Study for Obedience

Sarah Bernstein is from Montreal Quebec and lives in the Northwest Highlands. Her fiction poetry and essays have appeared in places like tender Contemporary Women's Writing MAP Granta and Room Magazine. She teaches modern and contemporary literature. Her first novel The Coming Bad Days was published in 2021. A powerful compressed masterwork that explores questions of complicity power and devotion 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. Inside the house although she tends to her brother and his home with the utmost care and attention he too begins to fall ill...