Sarah Bernstein

Included in Granta's Best of Young British Novelists 2023 For readers of Shirley Jackson, Iain Reid, and 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 and 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 and 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 shape, who knows what might happen, what one might be capable of doing. With a sharp, lyrical voice, Sarah Bernstein powerfully explores questions of complicity and power, displacement and inheritance. Study for Obedience is a finely tuned, unsettling novel that confirms Bernstein as one of the most exciting voices of her generation.

A novel

Study for Obedience

Iris van der zanden

As for being easy in my mind, I could never be that, no, but that, I felt, was my salvation.

james cao

How to describe how I felt then, pacing the floorboards in my bare feet, unable to tear my eyes away from the world outside, unable to leave the porch, and finding it impossible to stay still. I experienced a physical pain as I watched the crooked pines blow in the wind. And then each time I cycled to the outskirts of the town, not yet confident enough to breach its limits, I pictured without surprise the bike skidding off the road and into the creek running below it, or else a load of logs coming loose from a truck bed and impaling me or crushing me to death

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