In an undisclosed year near the present day, a small group of women wake up to find themselves somewhere in the Australian outback, belongings stripped, memories absent. They are shaved, shoved into unremarkable garments, and told to march by their overseer across the sands to a secret—and to the rest of the world, invisible—labor camp. Thus begins Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things.
This eerie and, in many ways, devastating book was originally published in 2015, but has received new media attention at its rerelease with Riverhead Books. I bring attention to this fact because much of my feelings toward this book rely upon it—I can say with utter certainty that had I read this in the year it was released, my thoughts on it would be very different. As it stands, though, it’s been over a decade.
Our two main protagonists are Yolanda and Verla, two headstrong women who come to realize they have both been taken, as have all the women, because of their involvement in some kind of sexual scandal with powerful men. For Verla, a politician, and for Yolanda, multiple professional athletes. Overseen by two incompetent men, Bouncer, a sadist, and Teddy, a fool, Verla, Yolanda, and the rest of the women are forced to work daily in a desert-land labor camp, with scarcely any food and virtually no hope of rescue to come. As the seasons pass, the women find small things to keep them going: grooming, hunting, foraging. They find ways to survive, ways to cling to their sanity. As women always have.
A beautiful thing about this book was how this terrible journey the women embark on doesn’t create this joyous sense of camaraderie amongst them. There is begrudging respect that grows between them, there are moments of harmony, there are small acts of kindness to be sure. But just as much there are cliques, there is judgement, there is comparison, there is unwilling sacrifice. I greatly appreciated the sense of realness that Wood employed for these women. I find that often in stories such as these, women are shown to all become best friends, basking in one another’s relentless joy despite their circumstances. Wood instead dares to venture into truth: dire, horrific circumstances does not negate natural compatibility truths amongst women, or, trauma does not always inherently bond. Seeing the multitudes of ways that Wood allowed these women to cope, to carry on, was a breath of fresh air in a world that wants to force women into boxes, often ones of good-natured suffering.
To this end, Wood also creates an excellent ambiance of hopelessness from the desert elements. The heat, of both the atmosphere and the ever-present guards, push the women to further physical and emotional depths than they thought they could go. Their isolation forces confrontation of their pasts, and the pasts of those around them. The small cells they are forced to reside in at night are suffocating; they force the women together, into each other’s spaces, and largely into one another’s minds. Wood has a stellar understanding of space and setting, and how to use them effectively.
To circle back to the point of why I brought up this books’ publication date, my main quibble with this book was that the reading experience of it all felt a little too déjà vu. Perhaps this is because of a formative book I read at the age of eleven about a young girl who is stolen away into the Australian outback, or perhaps it is the inimitable I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman that features a strikingly similar playout sans desert sands. It feels to me that there are many speculative women’s fiction out there now, and all of it likes to explore what happens to women when they are reduced to just themselves: just womanhood. Since the Me Too movement, this fiction has exploded; it’s trendy, it’s cool, it’s popular. But as someone who has read a lot of it, much of it isn’t daring, it isn’t genre-pushing, it isn’t innovative. I’m not saying that The Natural Way of Things isn’t a wonderfully written book, because it is, but…for me, it fell safely in the latter category. The movement of the story was, while moving at times, largely predictable. The idea that these women are being held because men have sold them out due to being involved in illicit sexual acts is believable, sure, but that none of these ten women have a soul who would look for them? Less so. The book is too grounded in reality to be pushing so hard against it. I do think it’s likely that in 2015 when this book came out it was cutting-edge and genre-pushing, but as it lands today, it was largely just familiar.
Fiction
The Natural Way of Things
By Charlotte Wood
Riverhead Books
Published March 10, 2026
