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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.
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.
"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 (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
"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
"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
This information about Stone Yard Devotional was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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.
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