Winner of the 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize Shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize 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, & what transpires is a meditation on survival itself — The Booker Prize 2023 judges°°° For readers of Shirley Jackson, Iain Reid, & 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 a housekeeper to her brother, whose wife has recently left him.Soon after her arrival, a series of inexplicable events occur - 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 & 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. Inside the house, although she tends to her brother & his home with the utmost care & attention, he too begins to fall ill... With a sharp, lyrical voice, Sarah Bernstein powerfully explores questions of complicity & power, displacement & inheritance. Study for Obedience is a finely tuned, unsettling novel that confirms Bernstein as one of the most exciting voices of her generation.°°° Sarah Bernstein is a Canadian writer & scholar. In 2015, she published Now Comes the Lightning, an acclaimed collection of prose poems. Her debut, The Coming Bad Days, was published in 2021.
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