Women Talking

Reviews

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER

FINALIST FOR THE 2018 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARD FOR FICTION

FINALIST FOR THE 2019 TRILLIUM BOOK AWARD

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2020 INTERNATIONAL DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE GLOBE AND MAIL, THE NEW YORK TIMES, TORONTO STAR, NPR, MACLEAN’S, THE WASHINGTON POST, CBC, SLATE, KIRKUS REVIEWS, PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, CHATELAINE, VOX, AND MANY MORE

“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.” —Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies and Florida
 
“Miriam Toews’s Women Talking is a flawless, ferocious work of art . . . [An] illuminating quest to comprehend the most vital contours of the human experience. . . . Get ready.” —Laura van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel
 
“Miriam Toews has written a modern classic . . . real and warm and terrifying . . . It’s a perfect work of art.” —Catherine Lacey, author of The Answers and Nobody is Ever Missing

“I am in awe of this novel. In Toews’s brilliant design, eight women in a Mennonite hayloft tell a story that is terrifying, joyful, gruesome, and magnetic. What a reckoning—and what a gift.” —Leni Zumas, author of Red Clocks

“Astonishing . . . a work of deep moral intelligence, a master class in ethics beautifully dressed as a novel. . . . The intelligence on display in Women Talking is as ferocious as it is warm.” —NPR

"This beautiful battle cry of a novel is in urgent conversation with the contemporary moment." ―Financial Times

“Toews proves brilliant at conveying character and relationships through dialogue, delineating each woman with loving precision. . . . The book’s language is Faulknerian. It has a timeless, universal quality.” —The Guardian

"A call to arms against the subjugation of women everywhere.” —TIME

“Women Talking expands a small true story into a discussion of significance to all womankind. . . . Understated, insistent . . . Toews’s talents . . . lie in creating tiny, believable moments that make precise incisions in the centre of the human heart.” —The Globe and Mail

"Remarkably layered and gripping." —Wall Street Journal

“Miriam Toews is wickedly funny and fearlessly honest. . . . She is an artist of escape; she always finds a way for her characters, trapped by circumstance, to liberate themselves.” —The New Yorker

“Compelling. . . . Women Talking is no ordinary book, and even before hitting the shelves it’s got people talking. Some who received advance copies, including Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, have placed it firmly in the camp of feminist books that will become part of a canon that questions the patriarchy.” —Toronto Star

“Toews’s celebrated novels are haunted by her upbringing, but she has never written with such heartbreak, or taken such sure aim at fundamentalism and its hypocracies. . . . Did I mention the book is funny? Wickedly so, with Toews’s brand of seditious wit.” —The New York Times

"Brave and thoughtful. . . . The improbable, almost magical result creates something redemptive from a subject that seems anything but." ―Observer

“A beautiful, hopeful thing to behold.” — Quill & Quire (starred review)

“A sharp blade of a novel. . . . Toews’s eviscerating fictionalization of this incendiary reality focuses not on the violence but, rather, on the keen, subversive intelligence of the Mennonite women, their philosophical casts of mind, clashing personalities, and deep concerns about family and faith.” —Booklist (starred review)
 
“An inspiring and unforgettable novel.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
 
“An exquisite critique of patriarchal culture. . . . Stunningly original and altogether arresting.” —Kirkus Review (starred review) Expand reviews