She advises Swiv on how to dig a winter grave. She obsesses over mucus and bowel movements and discusses them loudly on public transport. Swiv’s grandma, Elvira, comes from a religious old world that she’s carried into the west she remembers life in an unspecified “town of escaped Russians”, complete with a secret language, and stories of brutal men and their unpunished crimes. “Grandma is hard of hearing and Mom is hard of listening,” she writes, “so I have to yell all day long.” Where Swiv’s voice is urgent, young and curious, Elvira’s is full of memory, anger and mourning Her father is gone, her mother pregnant, and Swiv must now protect her unborn sibling from these loud, bawdy, messy mothers who gab about sex and nakedness and drop pasta and pills everywhere and can’t even rinse the sink after gargling oregano oil. She’s stuck in a tiny Toronto home with her embarrassing mother and grandmother. Her grandmother keeps a scrapbook of the fights in her life, and now Swiv is suspended from school for the same thing. Swiv is nine and comes from a family of fighting women. Her eighth novel, Fight Night, is an ode to grandmotherly defiance, embodied by a kind of ancestor that I, too, know well: a mouthy immigrant, an old-world fighter, a fiery human contradiction. Women Talking was a finalist for the 2018 Governor General's Literary Award for fiction and was a finalist for the 2019 Trillium Book Award.Toews’s primary theme is the battles of women in a world of cruel men, and intergenerational misfires as mothers try to protect and warn their daughters. And like a vast night sky coming into view behind the bright sparks of their voices, we learn of the devastating events that have led to this moment. ( From Knopf Canada)
Gradually, as we hear the women's vivid voices console, tease, admonish, regale and debate each other, we piece together the reason for the gathering: they have 48 hours to make a life-altering choice on behalf of all the women and children in the colony. Thus begins Miriam Toews's spellbinding novel. This task will be both simple and subversive: August, like the women, is a traditional Mennonite, and he has been asked to record a secret conversation. Eight women - ordinary grandmothers, mothers and teenagers yet to August, each one extraordinary - will climb the ladder into the loft, and the day's true task will begin.
He writes quickly, aware that his solitude will soon be broken. August Epp sits alone in the hayloft of a barn, anxiously bent over his notebook. The sun rises on a quiet June morning in 2009.
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