Publication Date: 06/07/2023 ISBN: 9781783789931 Category: Tag:

Study for Obedience

Sarah Bernstein

Publisher: Granta Books
Publication Date: 06/07/2023 ISBN: 9781783789931 Category: Tag:
Hardback

£12.99

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Mr B's review

A strange, elliptical book with an unnamed female narrator who moves to a village in a northern country to care for her older brother. Her arrival coincides with a series of fatal incidents involving the local domestic animals and the villagers treat her with fear and distrust. A lifetime of obedience to her family has created in her a need for self-effacement and her meandering walks give her space to muse on her existence and on the history of her family and ancestors. There are hints of incestuous abuse, of the extermination of her Jewish ancestors from this self -same village and of guilt both in the survivors and the perpetrators.
The writing is beautiful; the story is thought-provoking and oddly slippery as our narrator proves evasive , introspective and unreliable.
For fans of Ishiguro and Murakami. – Sue

Description

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2023
WINNER OF THE SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE 2023
LONGLISTED FOR THE HIGHLAND BOOK PRIZE 2023
NAMED AS ONE OF GRANTA MAGAZINE’S BEST OF YOUNG BRITISH NOVELISTS 2023

A powerful, compressed masterwork for fans of Shirley Jackson and Claire-Louise Bennett

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…

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