Women Talking by Miriam Toews

NATIONAL BESTSELLER
International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2020, Long-listed

Trillium Book Award 2019, Short-listed
A FINALIST FOR THE GOVERNOR GENERAL’S LITERARY AWARD: A transformative and necessary work—as completely unexpected as it is inspired—by the award-winning author of the bestselling novels All My Puny Sorrows and A Complicated Kindness.

On a quiet June morning in 2009, August Epp sits alone in the hayloft of a barn, anxiously bent over his notebook. Soon eight women—ordinary grandmothers, mothers and teenagers—will climb the ladder into the loft, and the day’s true task will begin. This task will be both simple and subversive: August, like the women, is a traditional Mennonite, and he has been asked to record a secret conversation.

Thus begins this spellbinding novel from award-winning writer Miriam Toews. Gradually, as we hear the women’s vivid voices console, tease, admonish, regale and debate each other, we piece together the reason for the gathering: they have forty-eight hours to make a life-altering choice on behalf of all the women and children in the colony.

Acerbic, funny, tender, sorrowful and wise, Women Talking is composed of equal parts human love and deep anger. It explores the expansive, timeless universe of thinking and feeling about women—and men—in our contemporary world.

Story Locale: Molotschna Colony (an imagined Mennonite community in South America)

Paperback, 240 pages

MIRIAM TOEWS’ bestselling All My Puny Sorrows, won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Canadian Authors Association Award for Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Folio Prize and the Wellcome Book Prize, among other accolades. It also appeared on many year-end best-book lists, nationally and internationally. Toews is the author of five other bestselling novels: Summer of My Amazing Luck, A Boy of Good Breeding, A Complicated Kindness (winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, winner of Canada Reads, and a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize), The Flying Troutmans and Irma Voth, and one work of non-fiction, Swing Low: A Life. In addition to the awards mentioned above, she has also won the Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, the Writers’ Trust Marian Engel/Timothy Findley Award, and Italy’s Sinbad Award for Fiction. Miriam Toews lives in Toronto.

Author Residence: Toronto, Ontario

Author Hometown: Winnipeg, Manitoba