Study For Obedience
ABOUT
THE BOOK
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. 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 toils in service of the community, yet 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…
NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS
Sarah Bernstein’s A Study for Obedience follows an unnamed narrator, an outsider in a small town of deeply held suspicions and prejudice. The narrator is unreliable, obscure, difficult to connect with but compelling to read, with a distinctive voice written in an elegant, sometimes archaic prose. As she is increasingly blamed by the townsfolk for a series of local farming disasters, tension builds and the reader experiences an overwhelming sense of dread. A Study for Obedience explores power and exclusion, subservience as a survival skill and internalization of blame.