The Natural Way of Things A Novel

“The Handmaid’s Tale for our age” (The Economist), this dystopian tale about a group of women held prisoner in the Australian desert is a prescient feminist fable and international classic from the Booker-shortlisted author of Stone Yard Devotional and The Weekend. Two women awaken from a drugged sleep to find themselves imprisoned in a broken-down property in the middle of a desert. Strangers to each other, they have no idea where they are or how they came to be there with eight other women, their heads shaved, guarded by two inept yet vicious jailers. Doing hard labor under a sweltering sun, the prisoners soon learn what links them: in each woman's past is a sexual scandal with a powerful man. They pray for rescue but as the hours turn into days and the days into weeks and months, it becomes clear that the women must rescue themselves. The Natural Way of Things is a lucid and illusory fable and a brilliantly plotted novel of ideas that reminds us of humankind's own vast contradictions—the capacity for savagery, selfishness, resilience, and redemption all contained by a single, vulnerable body.