The Natural Way of Things

Two young women wake drugged and disoriented in an unfamiliar place, their heads shaved and their bodies forced into coarse, old-fashioned uniforms. They are not alone: eight other girls have been imprisoned with them in a derelict property somewhere in the vast Australian outback, ringed by an electric fence and guarded by two brutish young men and a sinister nurse.

Slowly the women realize what binds them together. Each was at the center of a public sexual scandal involving a powerful man, and each has been spirited away and punished for it. As the seasons turn and supplies dwindle, the line between captors and captives begins to blur, and the women must decide whether survival means submission or resistance.

Charlotte Wood's fierce, unsettling novel is a modern feminist fable about misogyny, shame, and complicity, written in spare and hypnotic prose. Unflinching and provocative, it asks what women owe one another, and themselves, when the world decides they are disposable.