Author(s): Charlotte Wood

Fiction

'Savage: think Atwood in the outback' Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl on the Train
'An unforgettable reading experience' Liane Moriarity, author of Big Little Lies
'Ferocious... recalls the early Elena Ferrante' NPR
'A masterpiece' Guardian
'Devastating' Economist

She hears her own thick voice deep inside her ears when she says, 'I need to know where I am.'
The man stands there, tall and narrow, hand still on the doorknob, surprised.
He says, almost in sympathy, 'Oh, sweetie. You need to know what you are.'"

Two women awaken from a drugged sleep to find themselves imprisoned in a brokendown
property in the middle of a desert.

Strangers to each other, they have no idea where they are or how they came to be there
with eight other girls, their heads shaved, guarded by two inept yet vicious jailers.

Doing hard labour under a sweltering sun, the prisoners soon learn what links them: in
each girl's past is a sexual scandal with a powerful man.

They pray for rescue but as the hours turn into days and the days into weeks and months,
it becomes clear only the girls can rescue themselves.

Winner, 2016 Stella Prize
Winner, 2016 Indie Book of the Year Award
Winner, Fiction Book of the Year, 2016 Indie Book Award
Winner, 2016 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Fiction
Winner, Reader's Choice, 2016 ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year
Shortlisted, 2016 Miles Franklin Literary Award
Shortlisted, 2016 ABA Nielsen BookData Booksellers Choice Award
Longlisted, 2017 International Dublin Literary Award

CONSTANT READER REVIEW: RICHARD

Ten young women awaken to find themselves abducted and imprisoned in a secret micro-gulag somewhere unknown in the Australian bush. They have been accused of no crime, but each had been involved in a high-profile sex scandal with one or another powerful man. Their only human contact is with each other and their savage male jailers. Nobody else knows they are still alive.

This is the story of Yolanda and Verla, and the bond they forge in a scorching, electric-fenced hellhole of forced labour and shrinking rations. Wood writes with spare, tight prose in the present tense and makes the unimaginable seem all too real. She pulls no punches. 

This prescient book predated the MeToo movement and won the Stella prize among other awards. Despite its brutal subject matter this is a beautiful, beautiful book.