Ten years after its original publication, Charlotte Wood’s haunting dystopian novel, The Natural Way of Things, has been rereleased with a fair amount of buzz. Her 2024 novel, Stone Yard Devotional, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize—bringing additional attention to her work—with the added bonus that unfortunately 2026 is an apt year to rerelease dystopian fiction about young women being attacked and imprisoned. The novel begins with ten girls who awake from a drug-induced sleep to a pseudo-prison in the Australian Outback, where their heads are shaved and they’re issued coarse wool standard garments. They are forced to sleep in small and rank cells, and ordered around by a nasty pair of male guards, Boncer and Teddy.
The girls are at first lost as to why they’ve been dropped into this strange facility. Only when they’re able to speak with each other, they begin to put together that each are public victims of recent sex scandals involving powerful men. One of our narrators realizes: “Isobel Askell the airline girl, then Hetty the cardinal’s girl … Maitlynd the school principal’s ‘head girl’… that morose gamer girl Rhiannon, the one called Codebabe and the wanking mascot for every nasty little gamer creep in the country. Then poor cruise-ship Lydia, then Leandra from the army, then … the girl the whole country could despise: little Asian Joy, from last season’s PerforMAXX.” Each girl has publicly accused or been embroiled in a public sexual misconduct story, which has marked them out for targets by the powers that be.
The novel rotates between two central narrators: Verla, a young parliamentary intern who was carrying on what she believed to be a consensual affair with a senior politician, and Yolanda, who was gang raped by a team of footballers. Verla initially believes her imprisonment to be a mistake, that she will be rescued from this prison by the man that loves her and restored to his side, while Yolanda quickly understands the unfortunate truth—that she and the rest of these girls are being held and abused by the system to punish them for having female bodies. The girls begin to adjust to the everyday hardships they now face: grueling labor, insufficient nutrition, abuse by their guards, and an overall lack of cleanliness or comfort.
While the novel is deeply bleak (especially given how easy it is to imagine in our current moment), the real magic of the narrative is Wood’s sparse but evocative prose, conjuring this blistering landscape with such vivid detail that the reader can imagine themselves easily within the novel. But equal attention is paid to the interiority of the two narrators, who are sharp observers and fascinating figures in their own right. The novel really digs into the psyche of these tortured girls, their survival mechanisms, and their modes of resistance. The plot itself avoids easy explanation, but the larger project is a stunning entry into the canon of dystopian fiction for our current moment.