National Bestseller Winner of the Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize for Fiction Shortlisted for the Governor Generals Award for Fiction Shortlisted for the Reading Women Award This amazing sad shocking but touching novel based on a reallife event could be right out of The Handmaids Tale. Margaret Atwood on Scorching . . . Women Talking is a wry freewheeling novel of ideas that touches on the nature of evil questions of free will collective responsibility cultural determinism and above all forgiveness. New York Times Book Review Editors Choice One evening eight Mennonite women climb into a hay loft to conduct a secret meeting. For the past two years each of these women and more than a hundred other girls in their colony has been repeatedly violated in the night by demons coming to punish them for their sins. Now that the women have learned they were in fact drugged and attacked by a group of men from their own community they are determined to protect themselves and their daughters from future harm. While the men of the colony are off in the city attempting to raise enough money to bail out the rapists and bring them home these womenall illiterate without any knowledge of the world outside their community and unable even to speak the language of the country they live inhave very little time to make a choice Should they stay in the only world theyve ever known or should they dare to escape Based on real events and told through the minutes of the womens allfemale symposium Toewss masterful novel uses wry politically engaged humor to relate this tale of women claiming their own power to decide. Named a Best Book of the Year By THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW Notable Books of the Year NPR.ORG THE WASHINGTON POST REAL SIMPLE THE NEW YORK TIMES PARUL SEHGALS TOP BOOKS OF THE YEAR SLATE STAR TRIBUNE MINNEAPOLISST. PAUL LITHUB AUSTIN CHRONICLE GOOP ELECTRIC LITERATURE KIRKUS REVIEWS JEZEBEL BUSTLE PUBLISHERS WEEKLY TIME LIBRARY JOURNAL THE AV CLUB MASHABLE