STAR READ: Achiltibuie-based writer's mesmerising Study for Obedience

We never get to know the name of the woman who has come to a country where she doesn’t speak the language to be housekeeper for her rich, older brother, in this week’s Star Read.

But in Sarah Bernstein’s Study For Obedience (Granta), her version of the sinister events happening in the nearby town and surrounding country doesn’t explain why people there start to fear her and seem to blame her for what is going on.

A sow's piglets die, a trapped ewe has lost her lamb, bovine madness hits a beloved herd of cows – strange things indeed hit the community. In historic times, a search for a scapegoat might follow.

The reader is clearly allowed to see that the woman might once have been seen as that scapegoat, a witch perhaps.

It’s hard not to feel sorry for her and sympathise, see her as the victim as she often seems to present herself, and hope that she gets her wish to be obedient and seen as good.

But is she her own worst enemy?

“It seemed to me that my obedience had itself taken on a kind of mysterious power,”

Not long after sharing these words, her next move in the slender plot is to brave a local café where she fears she might not be welcome. And the customers’ over-the-top reaction of fear, borders almost on comedy.

Throughout the book, the Montreal-born, Achiltibuie-based writer, creates long clear sentences unfolding with precisely placed words: “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…”

Mesmerising, puzzling, sinister, "no horizon of possibility" – even survival, is left as you leave the last page of this short read. MC

Study For Obedience (Granta, £12.99)

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