

- Home
- Fiction
- Contemporary Fiction
- Women Talking
Women Talking
A profound, unsettling novel from the award-winning author of All My Puny Sorrows.
7 in stock
We are temporarily only able to ship Faber Shop orders to addresses in the UK.
‘Don’t miss this.’ Margaret Atwood
‘An astonishment, a volcano of a novel.’ Lauren Groff
‘Brave and thoughtful.’ Observer
‘Remarkably layered and gripping.’ Wall Street Journal
‘Wickedly funny and fearlessly honest.’ New Yorker
Between 2005 and 2009, in a remote Mennonite colony, over one hundred girls and women were raped by what many thought were ghosts or demons. Their accounts were dismissed as ‘wild female imagination’.
Women Talking is an imagined response to these real events. When the women learn the truth, they meet secretly to discuss how to protect themselves and their daughters from future harm. But they have just two days to decide, before the rapists are bailed out and brought home.
‘Don’t miss this one! This amazing, sad, shocking, but touching novel, based on a real-life event, could be right out of The Handmaid’s Tale’ – Margaret Atwood, Twitter
Don’t miss this one! This amazing, sad, shocking, but touching novel, based on a real-life event, could be right out of The Handmaid’s Tale.
Women Talking is an astonishment, a volcano of a novel with slowly and furiously mounting pressures of anguish and love and rage. No other book I've read in the past year has spoken so lucidly about our current moment, and yet none has felt as timeless; the always-wondrous Miriam Toews has written a book as close to a Greek tragedy as a contemporary Western novelist can come.
This beautiful battle cry of a novel is in urgent conversation with the contemporary moment.
What a beautiful thing – thoughtful but red-blooded with a cast of powerful personalities, and every word from them so deeply felt. It's a considerable achievement to have written so sensitively and yet so compellingly about such brutal crimes. It’s a novel for the times.
Miriam Toews has written a modern classic as real and warm and terrifying as a pail of fresh blood. It’s a perfect work of artthat will leave you ill with awe.
Toews, who made her name with the wry autobiographical novel All My Puny Sorrows, knows how to extract humour from horror while still producing a work of resonance and power . . . Tender, enraging and brimming with a bitter wit.
Miriam Toews (pronounced tâves) was born in 1964 in the small Mennonite town of Steinbach, Manitoba. She has published four novels and a memoir of her father, and is the recipient of numerous literary awards including the Governor General’s Award, the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award (twice), and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. In 2007 she made…
Read More
Browse a selection of books we think you might also like, with genre matches and a few wildcards thrown in.

Take a look at which titles Faber staff are reading and recommending for summer 2021.