#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER
WINNER OF THE 2023 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 BOOKER PRIZE
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2025 DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD

"Study for Obedience is 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." —The Booker Prize 2023 judges

“The modernist experiment continues to burn incandescently in Sarah Bernstein’s slim novel Study for Obedience. Bernstein asks the indelible question: what does a culture of subjugation, erasure, and dismissal of women produce? In this book, equal parts poisoned and sympathetic, Bernstein’s unnamed protagonist goes about exacting, in shockingly twisted ways, the price of all that the world has withheld from her. The prose refracts Javier Marias sometimes, at other times Samuel Beckett. It’s an unexpected and fanged book, and its own studied withholdings create a powerful mesmeric effect.” —2023 Giller Prize Jury

“One of the year’s best novels. . . . Study for Obedience has a parable’s radiance: the air of the consequential, of a cast who represents us all. Yet it’s too alive a story to rest on obvious messages. . . . Bernstein’s writing is philosophically opaque, as well as electric and elegant. It’s unfortunately fashionable to speak of what novels “say”, to posit that they, and everything else, should convey a single-minded stance. Such childishness melts away before a novel such as this: one that reminds you, beautifully, that fiction is a moral art.” —Daily Telegraph (5 stars)