Highland-based writer is announced on the Booker prize longlist

A book launched at the Ceilidh Place in Ullapool last month has made the longlist for the Booker prize.

Announced yesterday, the list of 13 novels includes Study For Obedience, the second novel of Sarah Bernstein, a Montreal-born Canadian writer who now lives near Achiltibuie and teaches modern and contemporary literature and creative writing at Strathclyde University.

Speaking to the Inverness Courier last month, the writer talked about the seeds of the idea for the book.

"I was thinking about the discourse around survivors and victims and what that is and I was interested in exploring what it is to be both."

And Ms Bernstein added: "Just because something bad has happened to you doesn't mean you're absolved of all moral responsibility for the rest of your life."

The book is published by Granta, the publisher including Sarah Bernstein on their latest iconic list of Best Young British Novelists under 40.

In the book, the reader never gets to know the name of the woman who has come to be housekeeper for her rich, older brother in a country where she doesn’t speak the language. Sinister things start to happen in the area and town beyond the siblings' house. A sow loses her piglets, a herd of cows goes mad, a trapped sheep dies with a lamb half-born. And with a creeping sense of darkness, the reader and the heroine understand that the locals believe she plays some part in the events. Going to a cafe to be seen doing normal things, the main character senses the fear she is causing:

“I looked around... Everyone it seemed had stopped eating on my arrival, or had never started, worried, I could tell, that in opening their mouths, in swallowing the runny egg, the bit of toast, whatever contagion they associated with me would attach itself to them…”

Inside the house, when her brother returns home, her attentive care can't stop him too falling ill…"

Reviewers have also interpreted the book as looking at Jewish xenophobia.

The writer's first novel The Coming Bad Days was published in 2021.

A shortlist of six books from the longlist of 13 will be announced on September 21. The longlist features four debut novelists and six who have been longlisted for the first time. The list also includes Old God's Time by Sebastian Barry, who has been nominated for the prize five times.

The winner will be revealed on November 26, receiving a prize of £50,000.

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