The Coming Bad Days

Book excerpt: The "lucid, funny and darkly alive" (Daisy Lafarge) debut novel from the Booker-shortlisted, Giller Prize-winning author of Study for Obedience. A woman leaves the man she lives with and moves to a low stone cottage in a university town. She joins an academic department and, high up in her office on the thirteenth floor, begins a research project on the poet Paul Celan. She knows nothing of Celan, still less of her new neighbours or colleagues. She is in self-imposed exile, hoping to find dignity in her loneliness. Like everywhere, the abiding feeling in the city is one of paranoia. The weather is deteriorating, the ordinary lives of women are in peril, and an unexplained curfew has been imposed. But then she meets Clara, a woman who is her exact opposite: decisive, productive, and assured. As their friendship grows in intimacy Clara suggests another way of living—until an act of violence threatens to sever everything between them. A penetrating portrait of feminine vulnerability and cruelty, Sarah Bernstein’s extraordinary debut is intelligent, brutal, sure, and devastatingly funny.