Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional, shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize, is something rare: a jewel-like, introspective novel in which not all that much happens, yet worlds are revealed. Set in a sparsely populated abbey in rural Australia, the story unfolds through the diary-like ruminations of an unnamed woman who has come seeking spiritual retreat from personal turmoil. After separating from her husband, who has gone to England, this self-described atheist was drawn to the circumscribed religious life of a small community of nuns near the provincial town where she was a girl. This sudden proximity to her childhood feeds her deepest thoughts, reviving specific memories and recasting truths about her loving, nonconforming parents, who shaped her worldview and whose deaths left a hole in her heart.
The first driving episode of this gentle novel is a plague of mice that infests the abbey. Depicted in all their relentless, squirming vehemence, the vermin are the consequence of a regional drought that brings home the inescapable environmental threat hovering over the wider world (the novel is also set during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, although Wood is careful not to make that the focal point of the story). The second event that rattles the otherwise isolated community is the discovery of the remains of a nun who disappeared in Thailand decades ago. The planned repatriation and burial of Sister Jenny’s bones triggers a third incident: the arrival of Helen Parry, a globe-trotting, celebrity activist nun whose presence is taxing for all, but most particularly upsetting for the narrator. As the second half of the novel plays out, the reason for this nettlesome friction, and the emotional hold Helen has over the narrator, deepens our understanding of her need for redemption.
Grief and forgiveness are undeniably the central tent poles propping up the novel, but Wood takes things further and deeper—wrestling with timeless human questions of faith (even among the faithless), mortality and kindness, parsing them with bare-bones clarity. 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.
