Please join Ben McNally Books, In Her Voice, and Knopf Canada as we celebrate the release of Women Talking by Miriam Toews.

Miriam will be taking the stage for a reading before being joined in conversation with Rachel Giese to discuss the inspiration behind her new novel, the process of writing it, and what it means to her to tell this story.

Signed copies of Women Talking will be available for sale.

When:

Monday August 20, 2018 @6-9pm

Where:

The Isabel Bader Theatre

93 Charles Street West

Cost:

$15

Please RSVP for the event here.

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.

Based on actual events that happened between 2005 and 2009 in a remote Mennonite community where more than 100 girls and women were drugged unconscious and assaulted in the night by what they were told (by the men of the colony) were “ghosts” or “demons,” Miriam Toews’ bold and affecting novel Women Talking is an imagined response to these real events.
The novel takes place over forty-eight hours, as eight women gather in secret in a neighbour’s barn while the men are in a nearby town posting bail for the attackers. They have come together to debate, on behalf of all the women and children in the community, whether to stay or leave before the men return. Taking minutes is the one man trusted and invited by the women to witness the conversation–a former outcast whose own surprising story is revealed as the women speak.
By turns poignant, witty, acerbic, bitter, tender, devastating, and heartbreaking, the voices in this extraordinary novel are unforgettable. Toews has chosen to focus the novel tightly on a particular time and place, and yet it contains within its 48 hours and setting inside a hayloft an entire vast universe of thinking and feeling about the experience of women (and therefore men, too) in our contemporary world. In a word: astonishing.

Miriam Toews is the author of five previous bestselling novels: Summer of My Amazing Luck, A Boy of Good Breeding, A Complicated Kindness (Canada Reads 2006, Canada Reads Canadian Bestseller of the Decade 2010), The Flying Troutmans, and Irma Voth, and one work of non-fiction, Swing Low: A Life. She is a winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Writers Trust Marian Engel/Timothy Findley Award. She lives in Toronto.

Rachel Giese is an editor-at-large at Chatelaine and a regular contributor to CBC Radio. Her award-winning journalism has appeared in Toronto Life, The Walrus, TheGlobe and Mail and Today’s Parent and on NewYorker.com. Her most recent book, Boys: What it Means to Become a Man was published this year with HarperCollins Canada. She lives in Toronto with her wife and son.