Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein

Shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize
Included in Granta's Best of Young British Novelists 2023

For readers of Shirley Jackson, Iain Reid, & Claire-Louise Bennett, a haunting, compressed masterwork from an extraordinary new voice in Canadian fiction.

A young woman moves from the place of her birth to the remote northern country of her forebears to be housekeeper to her brother, whose wife has recently left him. 
Soon after her arrival, a series of inexplicable events occurs - collective bovine hysteria; the demise of a ewe & her nearly born lamb; a local dog's phantom pregnancy; a potato blight. 

She notices that the local suspicion about incomers in general seems to be directed with some intensity at her & she senses a mounting threat that lies 'just beyond the garden gate.' And as she feels the hostility growing, pressing at the edges of her brother's property, she fears that, should the rumblings in the town gather themselves into a more defined...

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Sarah Bernstein is a Canadian writer & scholar. In 2015, she published Now Comes the Lightning, an acclaimed collection of prose poems. Her debut, The Coming Bad Days, was published in 2021.  Study for Obedience, shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023, is Bernstein’s second novel. Her fiction, poetry & essays have appeared in publications such as Contemporary Women’s Writing, MAP magazine, Granta & ROOM Magazine. In 2023, she was named by Granta as one of the best young writers in Britain.