JUSTICE UNBOUND BOOK CLUB

All are welcome to join Legal Aid Society’s book club, Justice Unbound. We believe that stories have the power to create empathy and connect communities. Our book club aims to explore issues related to civil legal justice, better understand the challenges facing low-income communities, and inspire creative solutions to complicated and systemic issues.

Benefits of Joining

20% discount on all book club books at Carmichaels Bookstore
Invitation to our Books and Breakfast series (our book discussion events)
Connection with a community of individuals passionate about civil legal justice

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NOW READING

Women Talking, by Miriam Toews

One evening, eight Mennonite women climb into a hay loft to conduct a secret meeting. For the past two years, each of these women, and more than a hundred other girls in their colony, has been repeatedly violated in the night by demons coming to punish them for their sins. Now that the women have learned they were in fact drugged and attacked by a group of men from their own community, they are determined to protect themselves and their daughters from future harm.

While the men of the colony are off in the city, attempting to raise enough money to bail out the rapists and bring them home, these women—all illiterate, without any knowledge of the world outside their community and unable even to speak the language of the country they live in—have very little time to make a choice: Should they stay in the only world they’ve ever known or should they dare to escape?

Based on real events and told through the “minutes” of the women’s all-female symposium, Toews’s masterful novel uses wry, politically engaged humor to relate this tale of women claiming their own power to decide.

About Miriam Toews

Miriam Toews is a Canadian writer of Mennonite descent. She grew up in Steinbach, Manitoba and has lived in Montreal and London, before settling in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Toews studied at the University of Manitoba and the University of King's College in Halifax, and has also worked as a freelance newspaper and radio journalist. Her non-fiction book "Swing Low: A Life" was a memoir of her father, a victim of lifelong depression. Her 2004 novel "A Complicated Kindness" was her breakthrough work, spending over a year on the Canadian bestseller lists and winning the Governor General's Award for English Fiction. The novel, about a teenage girl who longs to escape her small Russian Mennonite town and hang out with Lou Reed in the slums of New York City, was also nominated for the Giller Prize and was the winning title in the 2006 edition of Canada Reads.

You’re invited

Books & Breakfast

Thursday, May 7

8:30 AM to 10 AM

Legal Aid Society

416 W. Muhammad Ali Blvd., Ste. 300

Join us for the companion event where we dive deeper into the book and it’s themes as they related to poverty in our community, legal aid, and the role of the legal system.

RSVP TO BOOKS & BREAKFAST

Past Reading

James by Percival Everett

"I hated the world that wouldn't let me apply justice without the certain retaliation of injustice"
Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts

“The concept of the kitchen ghosts came to me years ago when I realized that my ancestors are always with me and that the women are most present while I’m chopping or stirring or standing at the stove. The art of cooking and engaging with my kitchen ghosts made me realize that food is never just about the present—every dish”
The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek by Kim Michele Richardson

“Their hunger for books could teach them of a better life free of the hunger, but without food they'd never live long enough or have the strength to find it.”
MAID by Stephanie Land

March 2025
“I had to stop hoping for someone to come along and love me. I had to do it myself, ducking my head and barreling through anything life brought. I felt like sitting down meant I wasn't doing enough - like the sort of lazy welfare recipient I was assumed to be.”
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

October 2024
“Live long enough, and all things you ever loved can turn around to scorch you blind. The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between.”
Other Suggested Reading

View from the Bench by Judge McKay Chauvin
“I Left Poverty After Writing ‘Maid.’ But Poverty Never Left Me.” By Stephanie Land.