Showing results by author "Miriam Toews" in All Categories

Elf and Yoli are sisters. While on the surface Elfrieda's life is enviable (she's a world-renowned pianist, glamorous, wealthy, and happily married,) and Yolandi's a mess (she's divorced and broke, with two teenagers growing up too quickly), they are fiercely close - raised in a Mennonite household and sharing the hardship of Elf's desire to end her life.

Sixteen-year-old Nomi Nickel longs to hang out with Lou Reed and Marianne Faithfull in New York City's East Village. Instead she's trapped in East Village, Manitoba: a town with no train station, no bar, and where job prospects consist of slaughtering chickens at the Happy Family Farms abattoir. Since her mother and sister have left home, Nomi lives with her father, Ray, a sweet yet hapless schoolteacher. Fighting against the restraints of the town, Nomi's longing for a future of opportunity and hope sets her on course towards a climax at once startling and inevitable.

Between 2005 and 2009, in a remote religious Mennonite colony, over a hundred girls and women were knocked unconscious and raped, often repeatedly, by what many thought were ghosts or demons, as a punishment for their sins. As the women tentatively began to share the details of the attacks - waking up sore and bleeding and not understanding why - their stories were chalked up to 'wild female imagination.' Women Talking is an imagined response to these real events. 

Swiv has taken this advice too literally. Now she's suspended from school, in the care of her foul-mouthed, hilarious grandmother. Mom is busy being pregnant, so Grandma gives Swiv a very different education. Swiv learns maths with Amish jigsaws and How to Dig a Winter Grave. Grandma's methods may be unorthodox, but she has faced the worst of life with a wild, independent spirit and this is what she hopes to pass on. Time is running short. Grandma's health is failing and the baby is on the way—can Grandma inspire this fire in Swiv, and ensure it never goes out?

Durante años, en la recóndita colonia menonita de Molotschna, decenas de mujeres han sido sistemáticamente drogadas y violadas mientras dormían. Despertaban doloridas y sangrando. La comunidad se empeñaba en mantener que todo era producto de su absurda imaginación, o quizá del demonio, que las castigaba por sus pecados. 

Durante años, en la recóndita colonia menonita de Molotschna, decenas de mujeres han sido sistemáticamente drogadas y violadas mientras dormían. Despertaban doloridas y sangrando. La comunidad se empeñaba en mantener que todo era producto de su absurda imaginación, o quizá del demonio, que las castigaba por sus pecados. Los violadores, sin embargo, eran hombres de la propia colonia: tíos, hermanos o vecinos que finalmente acabaron en prisión pero que en apenas dos días serán liberados bajo fianza y regresarán a casa.

The closeted life of nineteen-year-old Irma Voth, recently married and more recently deserted, is turned on its head when a film crew arrives. They have come to make a movie about the strict Mennonite community in which she and her family live. Against her family's wishes, Irma takes a job on set and glimpses the wider world and a path towards something that feels like freedom.

Meet the Troutmans. Hattie is living in Paris, city of romance, but has just been dumped by her boyfriend. Min, her sister back in Canada, is going through a particularly dark period. And Min's two kids, Logan and Thebes, are not talking and talking way too much, respectively. When Hattie receives a phone call from eleven-year-old Thebes, begging her to return to Canada, she arrives home to find Min on her way to a psychiatric ward, and becomes responsible for her niece and nephew. Realizing that she is way out of her league, Hattie hatches a plan to find the kids' long-lost father.