Study for Obedience A novel

For readers of Shirley Jackson, Iain Reid, and Claire-Louise Bennett, a haunting, compressed masterwork from an extraordinary new voice in Canadian fiction.

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 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.

Soon after she arrives, a series of unfortunate events occurs—collective bovine hysteria; the demise of an ewe and her nearly-born lamb; a local dog’s phantom pregnancy; a potato blight. She notices that the local suspicion about newcomers 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.

And inside the house, although she tends to her brother and his home with the utmost care and attention, he too begins to fall ill . . .

SARAH BERNSTEIN is from Montreal, Quebec and lives in the highlands of Scotland. 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 and her first novel, The Coming Bad Days, was published in 2021.