The Natural Way of Things - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1760291870 ISBN 13: 9781760291877

Publisher: Allen & Unwin

Synopsis

Natural Way of Things

About this title

About the Author

Charlotte Wood is the author of five novels and a book of non-fiction. Her latest novel, The Natural Way of Things, won the 2016 Stella Prize, the Indie Book of the Year and Indie Fiction Book of the Year prizes, was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier's Literary Award and the Miles Franklin. Charlotte was also editor of the short story anthology Brothers and Sisters, and for three years edited The Writer's Room Interviews magazine. Her work has been shortlisted for various prizes including the Christina Stead, Kibble and Miles Franklin Awards. Two novels - The Children and The Natural Way of Things - have been optioned for feature films. The Australian described her as 'one of our most original and provocative writers'. She lives in Sydney.

Review

Exposing the threads of misogyny, cowardice and abuses of power embedded in contemporary society, this is a confronting, sometimes deeply painful novel to read. With an unflinching eye and audacious imagination, Charlotte Wood carries us from a nightmare of helplessness and despair to a fantasy of revenge and reckoning. * Guardian * How each character copes with their unusual incarceration is fascinating. The language is beautiful... Charlotte Wood's is a unique, original voice that soothes and shocks in equal measures in this pitch-perfect dystopian nightmare. * Townsville Bulletin * The kind of book you inhale in a sitting... Stark prose and unrelenting pace. * The Saturday Paper, Best Books of 2015 * [A] Confronting, confounding novel of mysteriously kidnapped and imprisoned women. * The Australian, Best Books of 2015 * Bold, provocative, startling and insightful, The Natural Way of Things is what fiction should be. * The Newtown Review of Books * A moving, mesmerising and brilliantly topical interrogation of misogyny that demands to be read at a sitting. * Adelaide Advertiser * A dystopian fable, both gripping and lyrical. * The Saturday Age, Best Books of 2015 * A virtuoso performance, plotted deftly through a minefield of potential traps, weighted with allegory yet swift and sure in its narrative advance. -- Rosemary Sorensen * Sydney Review of Books * A confronting and blazing read... A novel to provoke thought, conversation, disgust, anger and concern, a work that will haunt the reader with its poetry and the stark truths buried within Wood's brilliant exploration of a toxic culture in extremis. * Weekend Australian * This is an extraordinary novel: inspired, powerful, at once coherent and dreamlike. * Sydney Morning Herald, Best Books of 2015 * A haunting parable of contemporary misogyny...Ms Wood's writing is direct and spare, yet capable of bursting with unexpected beauty. * Economist * This is not psychological fiction but a horror parable; a portrait not of people, but of tendencies. Seen as mythical archetypes, the characters are only too frighteningly real...The Natural Way of Things is chillingly dark and unfashionably didactic. But it's also compulsively readable, and bears its load of significance with effortless power. The fury of contemporary feminism may have found its masterpiece of horror. * Guardian *

Edition details

• Publisher: Allen & Unwin
• ISBN 10: 1760291870
• ISBN 13: 9781760291877
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English