Women Talking

Women Talking (2018) is the seventh novel by Canadian writer Miriam Toews. Toews describes her novel as “an imagined response to real events,” the gas-facilitated rapes that took place on the Manitoba Colony, a remote and isolated Mennonite community in Bolivia: Between 2005 and 2009, over a hundred girls and women in the colony woke up to discover that they had been raped in their sleep. These nighttime attacks were denied or dismissed by colony elders until finally it was revealed that a group of men from the colony were spraying an animal anaesthetic into their victims’ houses to render them unconscious. Toews’ novel centers on the secret meetings of eight Mennonite women who, on behalf of the other women in the colony, must decide how to react to these traumatic events. They have only 48 hours before the colony men, who are away to post bail for the rapists, return.