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 death of a ewe and her nearly-born lamb; a local dog’s phantom pregnancy; a potato blight.   

She notices that the community’s suspicion about incomers in general seems to be directed particularly in her case. 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… 

Narrator 

The lead character, who is not named, is the youngest female sibling in a large family that has always treated her like a servant. She has spent her whole life being put-upon and exploited, existing only to tend to the needs of others. She goes to be her eldest brother’s housekeeper in a house outside a small town in an unnamed country where she doesn’t speak the language. After her brother leaves on business, the townspeople appear to hold the narrator responsible for various disturbing natural occurrences. The entire book is presented from her point of view and while we see the locals’ fear and distrust of her, despite her misguided attempts to forge a connection with them, we are left to guess at the reality of her effect on others, and what exactly leaves everyone she encounters feeling so troubled. 

Sarah Bernstein is a Canadian writer and scholar who was born in Montreal and now lives in the Scottish Highlands, where she teaches literature and creative writing. In 2015, she published Now Comes the Lightning, an acclaimed collection of prose poems. Study for Obedience, shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023, is Bernstein’s second novel. Her debut, The Coming Bad Days, was published in 2021. Her fiction, poetry and essays have appeared in publications such as Contemporary Women’s Writing, MAP magazine, Granta and ROOM Magazine. In 2023, she was named by Granta as one of the best young writers in Britain.

‘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. 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.’

‘I was trying to think through what it might look like if certain (usually feminised) characteristics associated with passivity could take on a kind of power, especially over the people reinforcing those sorts of gendered norms. That idea comes from the painter Paula Rego – that obedience can, in a sense, also be murderous – it can be harmful to the person demanding obedience. I was also interested in the question of innocence and the really bizarre expectation that, in order for someone’s suffering to be recognised as legitimate, that person needs also to be innocent – whatever that means. The novel’s narrator is a character who has been disempowered and badly treated in a variety of ways and who has also abdicated moral responsibility in other areas of her life, so the question of innocence is a complicated one, for her as well as for us. The question of agency is, I think, also complicated by the narrator’s sense of her own fatedness – her sense of living in a cycle of history she can’t work her way out of.’

Read Sarah Bernstein’s full interview here. 

The novel’s location is never revealed, other than being described by the narrator as a ‘remote northern country’. In your reading of the book, did you have a real country in mind, and if so which one? Why do you think the author chose to leave the setting nameless and open to interpretation? 

The book contains several 21st-century references, such as social media and Microsoft Teams, yet the setting and mood feel almost 19th century. Did you feel that you were reading a modern novel, a historical work, or a book with a time and space all of its own? 

One of the book’s epigraphs is a quote from the artist Paula Rego: ‘I can turn the tables and do as I want. I can make women stronger. I can make them obedient and murderous at the same time.’ How do you think this quote relates to the narrator? Clearly, she is obedient, but is she also capable of powerful and deadly acts? 

On the one hand, the narrator is the book’s victim; persecuted on an individual level by her own family, and (although not made explicitly clear) as a Jewish woman by society at large and carrying the burden of the past. But to what extent is she also the book’s villain? Is there an interpretation of the book in which she is almost a witch or demon, cursing the villagers and slowly killing her brother, without being fully aware of her own destructive power? 

At one point, the narrator discovers a strange mark carved into a wooden post outside her brother’s home. ‘It was not from an alphabet familiar to me, certainly not Latin or Greek; not Cyrillic, Hebrew or Arabic, none of these, no.’ Yet because of the other clues in the book, we might interpret the mark as something anti-semitic. The Booker judges said: ‘The author never uses the words “swastika”, but the reader understands this implicitly, and it’s chilling.’ Did you imagine the mark to be a swastika? What else might it be? 

While both the narrator and her brother are Jewish, only she faces hostility from the local community, while he is embraced warmly and integrated into village life, suggesting there is something about her as an individual that repulses them, rather than her Jewishness alone. What do you think it is? 

In the Guardian, Chris Power writes: ‘Reading a book in which details are so vaporous seeds interpretative doubt: might the fact the story’s setting doesn’t match any real-world country, and that the locals the narrator interacts so uneasily with remain ciphers, mean it should be read as a fable?’ Would you agree that the book has, in Power’s words, ‘a fable-like energy’ and if so how does that affect your interpretation of the events in the book? 

Natural events - a dog with a phantom pregnancy, cows gone mad, piglets killed by their own mother - take on a deeper, darker significance in the book and lend it an air of folk horror. To what extent did you read the book as a horror story? 

The book contains over a dozen references to other works of literature; passages which allude to writing by, among others, Virginia Woolf, Walt Whitman, Susan Sontag and Penelope Fitzgerald. Were you aware of any of these references while reading the novel, and why do you think the author decided to list them at the end of the novel? 

Some critics have taken issue with the book’s lack of plot or story. Few things of significance happen, and those that do are open to interpretation because the narrator’s account is either unreliable or lacking essential detail. Did you feel this was a book with little or no plot, and can a book with almost no plot still be great? 

The Jewish Chronicle: Sarah Bernstein: The Jewish author on the road to greatness 

Public Books: ‘Gestures of refusal’: A conversation with Sarah Bernsteine

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Cursed Bread by Sophie Mackintosh 

The Enigma of Arrival by V. S. Naipaul

The Coming Bad Days by Sarah Bernstein 

You Let Me In by Camilla Bruce