Book of the Week: STUDY FOR OBEDIENCE by Sarah Bernstein

On short-listing Sarah Bernstein’s unsettling and relentlessly granular Study for Obedience for the 2023 Booker Prize, the judges said: ”Study for Obedience is an absurdist tale about how a stranger’s arrival in an unnamed town slowly unearths deep undercurrents of xenophobia, and it feels very like an allegory for the rise of ideological radicalism today. It is also a stirring meditation on survival. It has the uncanny charm of feeling like both a historical work – with its pastoral settings, petty superstitions, and suspicious villagers – and something bracingly modern. In this way it very cleverly, and with great irony, draws a link between a past we’d like to believe is behind us and our very charged present. The humour here is dry as a bone, very Bernhard-esque; it is obliquely and surprisingly funny.”

• The question of innocence is a complicated one.

• Read an extract.

• Gestures of refusal.

• A suspicion of incomers.

• The present collapses into the past.

• A ‘reading guide’.

• A woman on the fringes.

• The burden of survival.

• The void and the void.

• Read Thomas’s review of The Coming Bad Days.

• Other books short-listed for the 2023 Booker Prize.