[5] In 2022, the novel was adapted into a film of the same name, written and directed by Sarah Polley and starring Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, and Frances McDormand.

[6] Women Talking opens with a note from the author in which she describes her novel as both "a reaction through fiction" to true-life events and "an act of female imagination."

"[8][9] Eventually, it was revealed a group of male colonists had been using a chemical spray to sedate whole households in order to sexually assault the women.

Although the rapes are not depicted in the novel, their violent nature is evoked: Greta is wearing uncomfortable dentures because her teeth were knocked out during her attack, and the women have "faint scars, from rope burns or from cuts."

"[15] Klaas, Mariche's husband, who has returned from the city to gather twelve horses for auction, also climbs into the hayloft and is told that the women have just finished quilting.

The novel is presented as the minutes of the women's meetings, which are taken by August Epp, the colony's male schoolteacher who recently returned following a period of excommunication.

August takes the minutes at the request of Ona, the object of his unrequited love and his childhood friend, as the women cannot read or write (they speak Plautdietsch).

August is left behind watching over the sleeping brothers, pondering the women's sudden absence, his own life and decisions, and anticipating the return of the colony men.

He reveals that the real reason his family was excommunicated was because, at the age of twelve, he began to bear a remarkable resemblance to Bishop Peters.

[17][18] Mennonites started establishing colonies in Bolivia in the late 1950s after the government offered land in the Chiquitano dry forests region north of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, and promised exemption from military service, freedom of religion, and the right to dictate the education system.

[19] The first settlers came from Paraguayan and Mexican colonies which had been established thirty years earlier by fundamentalist Mennonites who fled Manitoba, Canada when the Canadian government began to enforce its official public-school curriculum.

A ninth, Jacob Neudorf Enns, escaped from the Palmasola Prison in Santa Cruz before he could stand trial and remains a fugitive.

[1] Toews is herself of Frisian ancestry, a direct descendant of one of Canada's first Mennonite settlers, Klaas Reimer (1837–1906), who arrived in Steinbach, Manitoba in 1874 from what is now modern-day Ukraine.

[28] Growing up in a religious, Mennonite town as part of the Kleine Gemeinde church, she witnessed first hand the harm that fundamentalism does to people, especially the truly faithful.

[29] In writing the novel, she says, "there was rage and heartbreak mixed with feelings of faith," and that the story contained all the questions she had about her own Mennonite community:[1] "When I became a teenager, I started to understand the profound hypocrisy, the sanctimony, the authoritarianism, this culture of control, or rules, of punishment, all of these things that seemed to me to be so far, far away from the presence of God.

[33] It also appeared on a number of year-end best-book lists, including The Globe and Mail,[34] The Toronto Star,[35] Slate Magazine,[36] Buzzfeed,[37] The A.V.