Study For Obedience
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023
Will be published approx. on 7. December 2023
Book
Paperback/Softback
208 pages
978-1-80351-122-1 (ISBN)
Description
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023
A woman moves from the place of her birth to a remote northern country to be housekeeper to her brother, whose wife has just left him. The youngest child of many siblings - more than she cares to remember - from earliest childhood she has attended to their every desire, smoothed away the slightest discomfort with perfect obedience, with the highest degree of devotion. The country, it transpires, is the country of their family's ancestors, an obscure though reviled people.
Soon after she arrives, a series of unfortunate events occurs - collective bovine hysteria; the demise of a ewe and her nearly-born lamb; a local dog's phantom pregnancy; the containment of domestic fowl; a potato blight. She notices that the local suspicion about incomers in general seems to be directed particularly in her case. What is clear is that she is being accused of wrongdoing, but in a language she cannot understand and so cannot address. And however diligently and silently she toils in service of the community, still she feels their hostility growing, pressing at the edges of her brother's property.
Inside the house, although she tends to her brother and his home with the utmost care and attention, he too begins to fall ill...
A woman moves from the place of her birth to a remote northern country to be housekeeper to her brother, whose wife has just left him. The youngest child of many siblings - more than she cares to remember - from earliest childhood she has attended to their every desire, smoothed away the slightest discomfort with perfect obedience, with the highest degree of devotion. The country, it transpires, is the country of their family's ancestors, an obscure though reviled people.
Soon after she arrives, a series of unfortunate events occurs - collective bovine hysteria; the demise of a ewe and her nearly-born lamb; a local dog's phantom pregnancy; the containment of domestic fowl; a potato blight. She notices that the local suspicion about incomers in general seems to be directed particularly in her case. What is clear is that she is being accused of wrongdoing, but in a language she cannot understand and so cannot address. And however diligently and silently she toils in service of the community, still she feels their hostility growing, pressing at the edges of her brother's property.
Inside the house, although she tends to her brother and his home with the utmost care and attention, he too begins to fall ill...
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 135 mm
Weight
214 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-80351-122-1 (9781803511221)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Sarah Bernstein is from Montreal, Quebec and lives in the Northwest Highlands. Her fiction, poetry and essays have appeared in places like tender, Contemporary Women's Writing, MAP, Granta and Room Magazine. She teaches modern and contemporary literature. Her first novel The Coming Bad Days was published in 2021.