Women Talking

By Miriam Toews Faber & Faber, 240pp, £12.99

This short, spare novel imagines a series of conversations amongst the women of a Mennonite colony in Bolivia as they decide whether to quit or stick with a community that expects them to forgive a group of men who repeatedly attacked them. It’s based on the experiences of women of the remote Manitoba Colony, who, over several years during the 2000s, were knocked out with animal anaesthetic and raped by several men in their community.

Toews takes these real events and weaves a response, in the form of the minutes of a meeting held in a barn where the women plait one another’s hair, rage and riot, argue and sob, and try to navigate a way through the constraints of their lives and the suffering forced upon them and their children. The minutes are recorded by a formerly ousted Molotschna Mennonite, August Epp, who records what the women say, for they cannot write themselves, while adding his own comments. A searing, brutal and quite astounding read, it will hit you devastatingly hard. ■

Ella Walker