Ullapool book launch for author Sarah Bernstein's new novel Study for Obedience
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The Ceilidh Place in Ullapool is hosting the launch next Friday of author Sarah Bernstein's new book Study for Obedience.
Originally from Montreal, Ms Bernstein now lives in the north–west Highlands, and combines writing with teaching modern and contemporary literature.
Her new novel has already received a five–star review from the Telegraph and will be published on July 6 by Granta.
The Ullapool launch of the new novel will be held on Friday July 7, at the Ceilidh Place's Parlour Bar from 6–8pm, with an evening of filled with book talk, readings, and signings from Bernstein.
Bernstein's fiction, poetry and essays have appeared in Contemporary Women's Writing, MAP, Granta and Room Magazine. Her first novel The Coming Bad Days was published in 2021.
She has been named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2023, and a previous poetry collection of hers was shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Writing.
Copies of Study for Obedience are available to pre–order from the Ceilidh Place Bookshop, or can be purchased on the night, and signed by Sarah Bernstein on request.
The following is a synopsis of Study for Obedience:
"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 child 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. The country, it transpires, is the country of their family’s ancestors, an obscure though reviled people.
"Soon after she arrives, a series of unfortunate events occurs – collective bovine hysteria; the demise of a ewe and her nearly–born lamb; a local dog’s phantom pregnancy; the containment of domestic fowl; a potato blight. She notices that the local suspicion about incomers 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.
"Inside the house, although she tends to her brother and his home with the utmost care and attention, he too begins to fall ill…"
