When she arrives at her hotel for a lunch date with her husband, she finds two men at the door of her room who inform her she is not welcome. Nisha, meanwhile, declines to wear the tatty flats she finds in Sam’s bag, and leaves the gym in flip-flops and a robe. The shoes seem to have a hypnotising effect on clients and lead her to land a series of new contracts.
Sam, who works for a printing firm and who is the sole breadwinner in her family, has meetings straight after her gym visit and so has no choice but to wear Nisha’s red crocodile-skin Christian Louboutin heels. The bag, a genuine Marc Jacobs unlike Sam’s designer knock-off, belongs to Nisha, an American in London and pampered second wife of billionaire businessman Carl. Unexpected and lovely.Īnd, at the end of the evening, we left with our very own copy of the book.I n Someone Else’s Shoes, Sam’s day takes an unexpected turn after she picks up the wrong bag in the changing room of her local gym. I felt that the interplay between the songs and the reading was like a conversation. The conversation turned out to be this: Christine Fellows would sing, then Miriam Toews would read. The store was PACKED.Ĭhristine Fellows hosted the evening, “in conversation” with Miriam Toews. We went to the Winnipeg book launch of Women Talking on August 23rd at McNally Robinson Grant Park…Īnd we weren’t the only ones. Those men don’t want their actions to be known. The fact that this has happened (and may still be happening today) needs to be known. (Before the novel begins, Toews includes a note stating that in 2013, there had been more reports of these attacks continuing within the colony.) But this book shines a very glaring light directly onto those events…and I think that’s very important.
I don’t know that things have gotten any better on the colony where these events occurred. This novel is heart-wrenching, infuriating, and beautiful. They talk, they share, they argue, they listen to one another. In this novel, the women realistically weigh their options: stay and fight, leave, or do nothing.
But Toews’ writing is nuanced, complicated, there are many factors to consider. And so, to be honest, I was wishing for a revenge novel of the most violent sort. Between 20, a group of men on the colony had been using an animal anesthetic to knock females unconscious and rape them. Miriam Toews truly has a gift for representing love and anger, humour and devastation, in a compelling narrative.įor those that perhaps don’t know or haven’t heard, Women Talking is a response to, or an imagined interaction with, actual events that occurred in an isolated Mennonite Colony in Bolivia. Have you read Women Talking yet? I finished reading it the other day, I couldn’t put it down.
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