A weird outsider, a religious town - and one of the year's best novels... Beguiling and smart... Bernstein's prose has a studied coolness, all concision and steady flow. Yet it develops a queasiness of tone as the narrator's dealings with the townsfolk become a painful comedy... Haunting...
Daily Telegraph
One of my favourite living writers... hypnotic... a complex ... Read moreand compelling book
GQ
Study for Obedience [...] spins a carefully woven web of culpability and criminality... Bernstein paints from a palette of dread... This masterly follow-up to her debut acts as a meditation on survival, the dangers of absorbing the narratives of the powerful, and a warning that the self-blame of the oppressed often comes back to bite
Observer
A story of abjection... This compelling book serves as a powerful castigation of those who would draw the lines of society and communal identity so as to narrow diversity and to punish those who dare to be different
Irish Times
[A] short, potent outing... a deliberately enigmatic, sporadically deadpan offering with a fair whiff of Samuel Beckett. But it's at its most compelling as the folk horror evolves, seemingly, into opaque revenge drama
Daily Mail
Remarkable... A beautiful, riddling tale, it's like nothing else you'll read this summer
Telegraph
Study for Obedience is a fully absorbing, beautiful and sinister portrait of becoming and unbelonging, of violence held in time and place, that enriches the reader's habitation of the world's intelligibility and its darkness
David Hayden Sarah Bernstein manages to combine cool, perfectly weighted prose with an extraordinary emotional sensibility
Fiona Mozley Sarah Bernstein's Study for Obedience is at once a languid and sometimes harrowing journey into the truth of human animals living in a small community and the need for a woman to give voice to the strange and beautiful cruelties of life. This is a unique novel that is primal and eerie, where language creates silence and vivid images reflect a kind of earthiness where our most intimate selves live. The wide praise for Bernstein's remarkable writing is well earned.
Asale Angel-Ajani, author of A Country You Can Leave Show Less