Obedience is set in a convent in rural France where Yallop’s elderly anti-heroine, Sister Bernard, took vows of chastity, obedience and poverty as a young woman, and eventually violated them all.

Sister Bernard is a simpleton: a peasant sprung from the land on which she would have worked, had it not been for the insistent voice of God in her head. She is regarded by her fellow nuns as exasperatingly stupid, but as this darkly shocking fiction unfolds, the enigma of her conduct becomes ever more perplexing.