The Natural Way of Things [Paperback]

“AHandmaid’s Talefor the 21st century” (Prism Magazine), Wood’s dystopian tale about a group of young women held prisoner in the Australian desert is a prescient feminist fable for our times. As theGuardianwrites, “contemporary feminism may have found its masterpiece of horror.”

Drugged, dressed in old-fashioned rags, and fiending for a cigarette, Yolanda wakes up in a barren room. Verla, a young woman who seems vaguely familiar, sits nearby. Down a hallway echoing loudly with the voices of mysterious men, in a stark compound deep in the Australian outback, other captive women are just coming to. Starved, sedated, the girls can't be sure of anything—except the painful episodes in their pasts that link them.

Drawing strength from the animal instincts they're forced to rely on, the women go from hunted to hunters, along the way becoming unforgettable and boldly original literary heroines that readers will both relate to and root for.

The Natural Way of Thingsis a lucid and illusory fable and a brilliantly plotted novel of ideas that reminds us of mankind's own vast contradictions—the capacity for savagery, selfishness, resilience, and redemption all contained by a single, vulnerable body. 

Winner
2016Stella Prize
2016Prime Minister’s Literary Awardin Fiction

An Australian Indie Best Fiction Book & Overall Book of the Year Winner

Finalist
2017International Dublin Literary Award
2016Voss Literary Prize
2016Victorian Premier's Award
2016The Miles Franklin AwardPraise forThe Natural Way of Things

“Beautiful and savage – think Atwood in the outback.”
—Paula Hawkins, author ofThe Girl on the Train

“[Wood’s] short, gripping book begins as an allegory of thuggish misogyny then evolves intl³3