The Natural Way of Things (2015) is a novel by Australian writer Charlotte Wood.

[2] Ten young women are held prisoner somewhere in the Australian bush by two male guards and a woman who purports to be a nurse.

Rosemary Sorenson in The Sydney Review of Books, is in no doubt about the novel's worth: "Charlotte Wood’s fifth novel The Natural Way of Things is a virtuoso performance, plotted deftly through a minefield of potential traps, weighted with allegory yet swift and sure in its narrative advance.

"[3] Kerryn Goldsworthy in The Sydney Morning Herald agrees: "This is an extraordinary novel: inspired, powerful, at once coherent and dreamlike.

While it's rich in symbols and in implications, much of it is brutally realist in mode, with its flights of imagination anchored in rational explanations: the result of drugs or fever dreams...The Natural Way of Things recalls all the reading you've ever done on the subjects of capture, isolation, incarceration, totalitarianism, misogyny, and the abuse of power.