But I quickly came to terms with my hair, realizing that short hair was my method of enacting femininity. After cutting my hair, I overcompensated on my girly-ness, wearing only skirts and dresses for a month. As my hair fell to the floor in clumps, a man in the booth next to me said, “Wow, you’re really going for it!” It felt so unsettling to have that commentary from anyone - not supportive, yet not judgmental. I was afraid that once my hair was gone, I wouldn’t feel like a girl, that I wouldn’t “feel” pretty. I gave myself three weeks to change my mind about the pixie cut. My plan was to cut off my unquestionably feminine shoulder-length locks. Yet anyone who reads it, man or woman, is going to be left with a sense that a long-hidden truth has been revealed to them.Two years ago I made an appointment - three weeks in advance - at a salon in DC. It confirms Charlotte Wood's position as one of our most thoughtful, provocative and fearless truth-tellers, as she unflinchingly reveals us and our world to ourselves.'As a man, to read it is as unsettling as receiving one piece of bad news after another. The girls can only rescue themselves.With extraordinary echoes of The Handmaid's Tale and Lord of the Flies, The Natural Way of Things is a compulsively readable, scarifying and deeply moving contemporary novel. They pray for rescue - but when the food starts running out it becomes clear that the jailers have also become the jailed. 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'.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?Doing 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. You need to know what you are.'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.

The natural way of things synopsis