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Her last novel, 2018's Women Talking, introduced a variation into this pattern, exploring the lives of people Toews does not know personally, but to whom she is distantly related. At the heart of Toews's "one big book" are the central traumas of her life - the depressions and suicides of both her father and sister - which she kaleidoscopically parses, considering what it means to trudge forward after catastrophic loss. She peppers her novels with Plautdietsch dialect, punctuates them with absurdity that deflates sanctimony, and centers them on the perspectives of strong women who have suffered much but are determined to persevere. Toews has, again and again, mined the oppressive patriarchy and repressive religion of the Mennonite community she left behind. Every protagonist is some version of me and there's always some version of my sister, some version of my mother, just some version of the people in my world."

In a recent interview with The Globe and Mail, Canadian writer Miriam Toews explained that she thinks of all of her novels as "one big book.