The perspective moves fluidly between Verla and Yolanda as they spend days, weeks, months imprisoned in this hell. Here they are held captive, where they are dehumanized as punishment. This is now their prison - but why? It doesn’t take long to discover what bonds them: each woman has been involved in a public sex scandal.

There are several other young women there, too. Yolanda and Verla wake up drugged in the middle of a compound in the Australian outback. It’s an allegorical rallying cry for feminists everywhere. If you combined Margaret Atwood, Lord of the Flies, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Furiosa from Mad Max, you would get this book. WOW! This is a ferocious beast of a novel.

They pray for rescue - but when the food starts running out it becomes clear that the jailers have also become the jailed. The girls all have something in common, but what is it? What crime has brought them here from the city? Who is the mysterious security company responsible for this desolate place with its brutal rules, its total isolation from the contemporary world?ĭoing 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. Strangers to each other, they have no idea where they are or how they came to be there with eight other girls, forced to wear strange uniforms, their heads shaved, guarded by two inept yet vicious armed jailers and a 'nurse'. Two women awaken from a drugged sleep to find themselves imprisoned in a broken-down property in the middle of a desert. He says, almost in sympathy, 'Oh, sweetie. 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. 'Beautiful and savage - think Atwood in the outback.' Paula Hawkins, Observer Winner of the Stella Prize Winner of the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Fiction Shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award Shortlisted Christina Stead Prize for Fiction Shortlisted for International Dublin Literary Award Observer Books of the Year 2016

The natural way of things book review