The women comfort and snipe at one another. Stay and fight - but with what resources? Leave? Impossible they cannot read, they possess no maps and they cannot think of abandoning their sons. Should they stay and forgive? Unfathomable a 3-year-old was raped and infected with venereal disease, an old woman so savagely attacked her teeth crumbled.

They have two days to make a decision for the female members of the community. Forgiveness is dictated by the religion the women know they must absolve the men or face expulsion, even damnation.

Eight women from two families gather in a hayloft. The men have left for the city, to raise and post bail for their brothers. The novel is set in the aftermath of the crimes. Her celebrated novels are haunted by her upbringing, but she has never written with such heartbreak, or taken such sure aim at fundamentalism and its hypocrisies, as she does in her new book, “Women Talking.” I could easily have been one of them.” Toews was also raised in the sect - “rigged for compliance,” she has put it - and is descended from the same Mennonite group as the colonists in Bolivia. “I felt an obligation, a need, to write about these women,” the Canadian novelist Miriam Toews has said.

When the eight culprits were put on trial, in 2011, the women were forbidden to testify their fathers and husbands spoke against the defendants instead. At least 300 female members of the colony had been attacked, from toddlers to grandmothers. The elders dismissed their complaints or blamed them on “wild female imagination” - until it was discovered that men from the community had been creeping through windows at night, sedating whole households with bovine anesthetic and raping the women. The family seem a poor fit in their religiously doctrinaire town, educated and prone to quote classic literature (the title references a Coleridge poem), and their Mennonite connection was apparently severed when Elf chose a worldly existence as a musician.They were called the “ghost rapes.” In 2005, Mennonite women living in a secluded colony in Bolivia reported waking up bleeding, with dirty fingerprints on their bodies and fraying rope around their wrists. If the answers are on the pages of Toews’ novel, they are merely hinted at in the film. “Why live?” seems like a counter-intuitive argument, but it’s at the base of the two sisters’ reunion, one in which Yoli seems reluctantly inclined to assist her sibling’s quest for assisted suicide if she can be convinced it’s the right thing to do. But Elf’s battle with depression, apparently inherited, leads her to a suicide attempt, the aftermath of which brings both sisters back “home.” There, they reconnect with their emotionally frozen mother ( Mare Winningham), who’s conflicted over having ignored the “do not resuscitate” demand in her daughter’s suicide note. Both Yoli and Elf have long ago escaped the social straitjacket of their solidly religious community.

All my puny sorrows book review