Wood - The Weekend

Praise for

The Natural Way of Things

Winner, 2016 Stella Prize

Co-winner, 2016 Prime Ministers Award

Winner, Fiction Book of the Year, 2016 Indie Awards

Winner, 2016 Indie Book of the Year Award

Shortlisted, 2016 Miles Franklin Literary Award

Shortlisted, 2016 Victorian Premiers Literary Awards

Shortlisted, 2016 Barbara Jefferis Award

Shortlisted, 2016 Queensland Literary Award for Fiction

Shortlisted, 2016 Voss Literary Prize

It feels at times like a nightmare; but one in which women make serious pacts, take serious pleasures, and reimagine what it might mean to live in the world. I feel as if Ive been witness to the most terrible injustice, but also the most astonishing beauty.

FIONA McFARLANE, author of The Night Guest

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, Wood carries us from a nightmare of helplessness and despair to a fantasy of revenge and reckoning.

The Guardian

Its rare to pick up a novel and from the opening pages be not only gripped by the story on the page but also by the keenness of the intelligence and audacity of the imagination at work one hell of a novel by one of our most original and provocative writers.

STEPHEN ROMEI, The Weekend Australian

An extraordinary novel: inspired, powerful, at once coherent and dreamlike recalls all the reading youve ever done on the subjects of capture, isolation, incarceration, totalitarianism, misogyny, and the abuse of power. Its thought-provoking in all directions.

KERRYN GOLDSWORTHY, The Sydney Morning Herald/The Age

Riveting the kind of book you inhale in a sitting. It leaves you woozy and disoriented, surprised to find yourself in mundane surroundings rather than sweltering in the desert heat.

The Saturday Paper

As a man, to read it is as unsettling as receiving one piece of bad news after another. It is confronting. Yet anyone who reads it, man or woman, is going to be left with a sense that a long-hidden truth has been revealed to them. A brave, brilliant book. I would defy anyone to read it and not come out a changed person.

MALCOLM KNOX, author of The Wonder Lover

Charlotte Woods book is a howl of despair and fury; but it is also that most rare and powerful of creations, a dystopian fiction that is perfectly judged, the writing controlled, the narrative engrossing and the language both searing and sensual. You cant shake off this novel, it gets under your skin, fills your lungs, breaks your heart. As allegory, as a novel, as vision and as art, it is stunning.

CHRISTOS TSIOLKAS, author of Barracuda

A virtuoso performance, plotted deftly through a minefield of potential traps, weighted with allegory yet swift and sure in its narrative advance. As an idea for a novel, its rich, and to achieve that idea the writer has been courageous. Her control of this story is masterful.

The Sydney Review of Books

At once brutal and beautiful Surreal yet intensely vivid disturbing and enthralling An absorbing plot, lyrical prose, and discomfiting imagery makes Woods novel decidedly gripping.

Kirkus Reviews

Few other novels have captured the stain of misogyny quite like this. Woods is a tale of survival in a world where captivity takes many forms; where power is a negotiation not just between prisoner and persecutor but of how far some women are willing to go in order to be free. Terrifying, remarkable and utterly unforgettable.

CLEMENTINE FORD, author of Fight Like a Girl

A prescient feminist horror novel you need to read.

Jezebel

Beautiful and savagethink Atwood in the outback.

PAULA HAWKINS, author of The Girl on the Train

One of those unforgettable reading experiences.

LIANE MORIARTY, author of Big Little Lies

Margaret Atwood meets Wake in Fright.

The Guardian

A haunting parable of contemporary misogyny The Handmaids Tale for our age.

The Economist

Exactly what we should be reading right now.

Full Stop

The fury of contemporary feminism may have found its masterpiece of horror.

The Guardian UK

A Handmaids Tale for end times.

The Believer

You wont read another novel like it this year. Or ever.

TEGAN BENNETT DAYLIGHT, author of Six Bedrooms

A stunning exploration of ambiguitiesof power, of morality, of judgement.

ASHLEY HAY, author of The Railwaymans Wife

A fully imagined dystopian parable, vivid, insightful, the voices of young women echoing through the gum trees

JOAN LONDON, author of The Golden Age

Charlotte Wood has been described as one of our most original and provocative writers. She is the author of six novels and two books of non-fiction. Her bestselling novel, The Natural Way of Things, won the 2016 Stella Prize, the Indie Book of the Year and Indie Book Award for Fiction, was joint winner of the Prime Ministers Literary Award for Fiction, and was published throughout Europe, the United Kingdom and North America. She has been twice shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, as well as many others for this and previous works. Her non-fiction books include The Writers Room, a collection of interviews with authors about the creative process, and Love & Hunger, a book about cooking. She lives in Sydney with her husband.

The characters and events in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

First published in 2019

Copyright Charlotte Wood 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

Allen & Unwin

83 Alexander Street

Crows Nest NSW 2065

Australia

Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

Email:

Web: www.allenandunwin.com

ISBN 978 1 76029 201 0

eISBN 978 1 76087 256 4

Internal design by Sandy Cull, gogoGingko

Set by Bookhouse, Sydney

Cover design and illustration: Sandy Cull and Shutterstock

For Sean,

and my friends

Dreams and beasts are two keys by which we are to find out the secrets of our own nature.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

CONTENTS

It was not the first time it had happened, this waking early in the pale light with a quiet but urgent desire to go to church.

Cognitive decline, doubtless. Frontal lobe damage, religion, fear of death, they were all the same thing. Jude had no illusions.