Study for Obedience

A Novel

By: Sarah Bernstein

Narrated by: Sarah Bernstein

Length: 3 hrs and 59 mins

Publisher's summary

WINNER OF THE 2023 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE

Shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize

Shortlisted for the 2023 Giller Prize

Included in Granta's Best of Young British Novelists 2023

For fans 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.

©2023 Sarah Bernstein (P)2023 Knopf Canada

Critic reviews

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER

"Sarah Bernstein performs her critically acclaimed novel in which an unnamed narrator moves to an unnamed northern country to become her brother's housekeeper after his wife leaves him.... Bernstein imbues her narration with the sense of otherworldliness that the woman feels as she tries to settle into her new home. Bernstein's performance echoes the uneasiness of the story, making listeners feel as unsettled and anxious as its protagonist." (AudioFile)

"Study for Obedience is an absurdist, darkly funny novel about the rise of xenophobia, as seen through the eyes of a stranger in an unnamed town–or is it? Bernstein’s urgent, crystalline prose upsets all our expectations, and what transpires is a meditation on survival itself."—The Booker Prize 2023 judges

“The modernist experiment continues to burn incandescently in Sarah Bernstein’s slim novel Study for Obedience. Bernstein asks the indelible question: what does a culture of subjugation, erasure, and dismissal of women produce? In this book, equal parts poisoned and sympathetic, Bernstein’s unnamed protagonist goes about exacting, in shockingly twisted ways, the price of all that the world has withheld from her. The prose refracts Javier Marias sometimes, at other times Samuel Beckett. It’s an unexpected and fanged book, and its own studied withholdings create a powerful mesmeric effect.”—2023 Giller Prize Jury

“One of the year’s best novels. . . . Beguiling and smart . . . Study for Obedience has a parable’s radiance: the air of the consequential, of a cast who represents us all. Yet it’s too alive a story to rest on obvious messages. . . . Bernstein’s writing is philosophically opaque, as well as electric and elegant. It’s unfortunately fashionable to speak of what novels “say”, to posit that they, and everything else, should convey a single-minded stance. Such childishness melts away before a novel such as this: one that reminds you, beautifully, that fiction is a moral art.”—Daily Telegraph (5 stars)

Lyrical and…..

There were segments so lyrical and beautifully written that I was drawn to the words and not the content. I’m not sure I was able to follow the lyrical pathway to understand the story.

Interesting and Unsettling

Interesting book it makes you think about inclusiveness and exclusion… Guilt over who you are… And historical prejudice. Worth your time.