Stone Yard Devotional: A Novel

by Charlotte Wood

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

A journey of the self through solitude. Quiet and contemplative, written with deceptively simple and straightforward prose, Stone Yard Devotional is a tender meditation on hope and humanity from an acclaimed author.

Shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize, a novel about forgiveness, grief, and what it means to be good, from the award-winning author of The Weekend.

“Stone Yard Devotional is as extraordinary as you’ve heard.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post

“An exquisite, wrenching novel of leaving your life behind.” —Lauren Christensen, New York Times

"Meditative (but by no means uneventful)." —New York Times

Burnt out and in need of retreat, a middle-aged woman leaves Sydney to return to the place she grew up, taking refuge in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of rural Australia. She doesn't believe in God, or know what prayer is, and finds herself living this strange, reclusive existence almost by accident.

But disquiet interrupts this secluded life with three visitations. First comes a terrible mouse plague, each day signaling a new battle against the rising infestation. Second is the return of the skeletal remains of a sister who disappeared decades before, presumed murdered. And finally, a troubling visitor plunges the narrator further back into her past.

Meditative, moving, and finely observed, Stone Yard Devotional is a seminal novel from a writer of rare power, exploring what it means to retreat from the world, the true nature of forgiveness, and the sustained effect of grief on the human soul.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798217047352
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/11/2025
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	4,414
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Charlotte Wood is the author of seven novels and three books of nonfiction. Her 2016 novel The Natural Way of Things won the Stella Prize in her native Australia and was joint winner of the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction. Her 2020 novel, The Weekend, was an international bestseller.

Editorial Reviews

01/13/2025

A woman joins a cloister of nuns in rural Australia in this artful outing from Wood (The Weekend), which was a finalist for this year's Booker Prize. The unnamed narrator’s decision surprises her husband, from whom she is separated, as well as her friends and even herself, as she’s an atheist. In spare, unadorned prose, Wood weaves the narrator’s observations of the religious community’s day-to-day life in New South Wales with memories of the past, particularly of the narrator’s late mother. The plot is driven by a plague of mice at the abbey and the arrival of the remains of Sister Jenny, a former member who died while operating a women’s shelter in Thailand. Accompanying Sister Jenny’s bones is Sister Helen Parry, a famous environmentalist. Unbeknownst to the others, the narrator and Sister Helen Parry knew each other in high school, and their reunion brings up uneasy memories for both women. Woods’s exercise in restraint elides obvious questions of faith and the existence of God, instead offering subtle insights on the nature of forgiveness and grief. It’s an intriguingly secular tale of religious devotion. Agent: Pamela Malpas, Jennifer Lyons Literary. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Stone Yard Devotional:

"Founded on the same rock of introspection that anchors the Gilead series….Stone Yard Devotional not only stays aloft but soars… A strange sense of engagement with these pages gives way to sheer gratitude for the chance to be in the presence of such restraint and wisdom.” –Washington Post

“The novel is, in many ways, an extended meditative vigil...Activism, abdication, atonement, grace: In this novel no one of these paths is holier than another; Wood is more invested in noticing the human pursuit of holiness itself.” —New York Times

"This meditative (but by no means uneventful) account includes a mouse infestation, a celebrity nun, a pair of complicated homecomings and countless reminders that the sacred and the profane not only coexist but complement one another." —New York Times

"Ms. Wood’s pastoral novel is contemplative, curious, rewardingly conflicted and frequently beautiful. Ms. Wood writes … with exceptional empathy. Most contemporary fiction plays out inside the echo chamber of a protagonist’s psyche; its stories are devoted to confronting and working through a private trauma. But while Stone Yard Devotional is suffused with sorrow, it exhibits very little grievance. The narrator’s observations are sensitive and impersonal, and they yield profound insights into the commonality of suffering.” —Wall Street Journal

“Stone Yard Devotional is about one woman’s inward journey to make sense of the world and her life when conflicts and chaos are abundant in both realms. . . A fierce and philosophical interrogation of history, memory, nature, and human existence.” —Booker Prize judges’ remarks

"I have rarely been so absorbed by a novel . . . A powerful, generous book.” —Guardian

“A book about what it means to be good: simply and with great humility, it asks the big questions, leaving the reader feeling kinder, more brave, enlarged.” —Anne Enright

“A novel of austere contemplation and personal devastation, its narrative driven by moral crisis rather than worldly action …. reflections on mortality seep into its fabric. For this is not a book of answers. Rather, it is a challenge: about how to be in the world, and how to be alone.”—Times Literary Supplement

“A beautiful, mature work that does not flinch from life.” —Sunday Times

“Wood threads a contemplative path for believers and nonbelievers alike. Reading her prose—sanded to deceptive simplicity—feels like spending time with a dear friend. What if attentiveness and “habitual kindness,” the narrator seems to ask, are bedrocks of a moral life? A wise, consoling novel for disquieting times.” – Kirkus (STARRED REVIEW)

“A jewel-like, introspective novel in which not all that much happens, yet worlds are revealed…. With its absorbing and deceptively simple narrative, Stone Yard Devotional is a beautiful testament to the rudiments of shedding the unessential and living a life of intention.” —BookPage

From the Publisher

★ 2025-01-18
A woman abruptly exits her life for a cloistered religious community in this Australian novel that was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize.

The narrator’s initial reasons for visiting the abbey are vague: She’s tired; she wants to escape; her marriage is falling apart; she’s still grieving her parents, dead for more than 35 years; she’s disillusioned with her work in the environmental conservation movement. The predictability of the nuns’ rituals turns out to be profoundly restorative. When Part II opens, the narrator has been at the abbey for four years. No one can make sense of her decision—not her husband, not her friends, not her colleagues who see her abdication as a lack of faith in their mission, and least of all the narrator herself, a self-described atheist, who explains, “I came back here one last time and then just…didn’t go home.” A plague of mice—an effect of climate change—the complicated logistics of trying to bring home the body of a murdered nun in the early days of the pandemic, and the return of a problematic figure from the narrator’s past nudge the plot forward, but what’s most gripping about the book isn’t what happens but rather the narrator’s quiet meditation on cruelty and kindness, love and forgiveness, our petty irritations with others and the process of allowing them to drift away. The “stone yard” in the title of Wood’s novel is the name of a neighbor’s sheep paddock. Devotion means love or loyalty; a devotional is a short worship service. Wood threads a contemplative path for believers and nonbelievers alike. Reading her prose—sanded to deceptive simplicity—feels like spending time with a dear friend. What if attentiveness and “habitual kindness,” the narrator seems to ask, are bedrocks of a moral life?

A wise, consoling novel for disquieting times.

Kirkus Reviews