2023布克獎決選
2023加拿大吉勒奬首獎
英國著名文學雜誌《Granta》評選全英最優秀新進小說家之大作
一位年輕女子離鄉背井,來到遙遠的北國國度-祖先的來處,擔任她那位富有卻行蹤飄忽不定,同時被妻子拋棄的哥哥的女管家。
當她抵達這裡,一連串莫名其妙的事件竟接踵而來:牛群發生狂牛症集體發作、一隻母羊連帶其剛出生的小羊雙雙暴斃、一隻幻想著自己懷了孕的當地的狗、馬鈴薯的傳染病等等。她發現當地的居民似乎開始將這一切的問題都歸咎到了自己,這個對於他們來說是可疑外來者的身上。這份疑心慢慢轉化成敵意,並且越來越濃厚,似乎已經擴散到了屬於她哥哥的大房子之外,甚至即將奪門而入。對於這顯而易見的危機,她開始感到懼怕,畢竟沒有人能夠預言這份在小鎮當地居民中發酵的流言蜚語,最終究竟會長成怎樣的德性,會促使人作出何種行動⋯⋯(文/博客來外文館)
WINNER OF THE 2023 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE
Shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize
Included in Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists 2023
For readers of Shirley Jackson, Iain Reid, and Claire-Louise Bennett, a haunting, compressed masterwork from an extraordinary new voice in Canadian fiction.
A young woman moves from the place of her birth to the remote northern country of her forebears to be housekeeper to her brother, whose wife has recently left him.
Soon after her arrival, a series of inexplicable events occurs - collective bovine hysteria; the demise of a ewe and her nearly born lamb; a local dog’s phantom pregnancy; a potato blight. She notices that the local suspicion about incomers in general seems to be directed with some intensity at her and she senses a mounting threat that lies ’just beyond the garden gate.’ And as she feels the hostility growing, pressing at the edges of her brother’s property, she fears that, should the rumblings in the town gather themselves into a more defined shape, who knows what might happen, what one might be capable of doing.
With a sharp, lyrical voice, Sarah Bernstein powerfully explores questions of complicity and power, displacement and inheritance.
Study for Obedience is a finely tuned, unsettling novel that confirms Bernstein as one of the most exciting voices of her generation.