The book
“A Handmaid’s Tale for the 21st century” (Prism Magazine), Wood’s dystopian tale about a group of young women held prisoner in the Australian desert is a prescient feminist fable for our times. As the Guardian writes, “contemporary feminism may have found its masterpiece of horror.”
Drugged, dressed in old-fashioned rags, and fiending for a cigarette, Yolanda wakes up in a barren room. Verla, a young woman who seems vaguely familiar, sits nearby. Down a hallway echoing loudly with the voices of mysterious men, in a stark compound deep in the Australian outback, other captive women are just coming to. Starved, sedated, the girls can't be sure of anything—except the painful episodes in their pasts that link them.
Drawing strength from the animal instincts they're forced to rely on, the women go from hunted to hunters, along the way becoming unforgettable and boldly original literary heroines that readers will both relate to and root for.
The Natural Way of Things is a lucid and illusory fable and a brilliantly plotted novel of ideas that reminds us of mankind's own vast contradictions—the capacity for savagery, selfishness, resilience, and redemption all contained by a single, vulnerable body.
Winner 2016 Stella Prize 2016 Prime Minister’s Literary Award in Fiction
An Australian Indie Best Fiction Book & Overall Book of the Year Winner
Finalist 2017 International Dublin Literary Award 2016 Voss Literary Prize 2016 Victorian Premier's Award 2016 The Miles Franklin Award
The author
Charlotte Wood
Charlotte Wood is the author of five novels and a book of non-fiction, and for three years edited The Writer's Room Interviews magazine. The Natural Way of Things won the 2016 Stella Prize, Indie Book of the Year, and Indie Fiction Book of the Year prizes. It was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. It will soon be published in the UK , North America and Europe.
Press
- Feb 9 2017
The brilliant “Natural Way of Things” is a “Handmaid’s Tale” for the 21st century
— PRISM International - Jan 20 2017
Best Books of 2016
— Brazos Bookstore - Dec 15 2016
The Best Things We Read in 2016 That You Still Can Too
— Jezebel - Dec 15 2016
Our Favorite Books from 2016
— The Believer - Nov 30 2016
The Natural Way of Things Is a Prescient Feminist Horror Novel You Need to Read
— Jezebel - Nov 27 2016
"Beautiful and savage – think Atwood in the outback."
— Paula Hawkins, author of THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN