Study for Obedience

"Shortlist"

"And in Canada the $100,000 Scotiabank Giller Prize was won by Sarah Bernstein’s Study for Obedience , an eerie and unsettling tale of xenophobia set in an unnamed northern country, which was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize earlier in the year. The Daily Telegraph declared it “a beautiful, riddling tale of a woman on the fringe of a rural community” that, though “philosophically opaque,” is both “elegant and electric.” Human rights lawyer Shankari Chandran won the $60,000 Miles Franklin Award for her third novel, Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens , a book about a fictional nursing home in Sydney populated with elderly Sri Lankan residents. “Don’t be fooled by the cute premise or the twee title,” warns ABC News. “This story has Australian identity and colonial mythology in its crosshairs, and the author is a crack shot.” Across the Tasman Sea, the 2023 winner of the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction was The Axeman’s Carnival by Catherine Chidgey, a novel set in the rural high country and narrated by an opinionated magpie. It is, said the judges, “poetic, profound and a powerfully compelling read from start to finish.” Readers in the US and the UK will be able to get their hands on a copy from April, published by Europa Editions . The 2023 Arthur C Clarke Award was won by Ned Beauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker . When I spoke to the prize director Tom Hunter earlier this year, he described it as a “dark, satirical, deeply angry book about our species,” which is “also eminently readable, oddly hopeful at times, and very, very funny.” I also particularly enjoyed another Clarke-shortlisted title, The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier, which is a rather excellent amalgam of airport thriller and Oulipian experiment. It won France’s Prix de Goncourt back in 2020 , but was only recently translated into English by Adriana Hunter. In it, a plane, including its passengers, is duplicated when it passes through a storm cloud. In a series of narratives, we explore how the various characters cope—or don’t—with their new, strange identity as a matching pair."

"Rounding off the 2023 Booker Prize shortlist is Scottish Canadian writer and literary scholar Sarah Bernstein’s unsettling, enigmatic second novel about a woman who moves to an isolated, northern town in another country to look after her brother after his wife leaves him. Soon the brother departs too, leaving her in a town where nobody likes her and where she does not speak the language. “I was not from the place,” the unnamed, unreliable narrator notes, “and so I was not anything.” It’s an allusive book that will reward the reader who does not seek hard answers to the uncomfortable questions that haunt this atmospheric text. In mid-November, Study for Obedience won the $100,000 Scotiabank Giller Prize, Canada’s most prestigious prize for fiction. Bernstein was also recently flagged by Granta as one of Britain’s best young novelists; you can also find a short extract from this book on the Granta website, if you’d like to get a flavour of the book before committing."

"A young woman moves from her remote hometown to take over domestic responsibilities for her brother after his wife leaves. After she arrives, she senses hostility toward newcomers as unusual events begin to unfold among the livestock. Although the plot is a bit of an enigma, the book delves into the lasting impact of trauma stemming from the Holocaust and the power of truths, both spoken and unspoken. Not the easiest read, but worth the work."