Stone Yard Devotional

PHILIPPA'S PICK

A radicalized, environmentalist nun, an agnostic nun, and the second nun’s mother…No, it’s not the beginning of some odd inside nunnery joke; these are the main characters in Charlotte Wood’s Booker shortlisted Stoneyard Devotional, which took A LONG TIME to get to us in Canada for some reason related to distribution. In this soft, friable book, the narrator faces a crisis in her life that leads her to mull over her own work as an environmentalist, her relationships with others, and her late mother’s reverence for the earth. In the meantime, the reverend mother of the convent is experiencing her own crisis, of guilt and forgiveness, of love and death.

The story is told in diary form and right up front there is an acknowledgement that much is being left out. What do we leave out of stories? Why would we leave things out of a diary? Or out of a confessional novel? One thing that might be an obvious omission is the struggle we all have with the unacknowledged act of faith that it takes to lead any life, let alone a cloistered one. 

The novel leaves out a lot of the detail of the drama and the crises it alludes to. The narrator visits a nunnery. Then, suddenly, before we are quite sure what has happened, she is living there. Her parents have died some years earlier and there isn’t much description of this event, or of them. But these omissions don’t feel like withholdings but more like an attempt to get to the heart of something by avoiding the direct route.

Somehow, in her new home that she seems to have slipped on like a thrifted coat, the narrator shifts herself intuitively closer to a connection with the earth and to a memory of her mother. On the first visit to the nunnery, she finds herself lying on the floor of her room. And again, toward the end of the book, remembering her mother’s response to the death of her childhood dog, she sinks to the floor, “…I sat on the floor before the heater in the blank space she had been. My mother said that anything that had once been alive should go back into the soil…I never knew anyone else who had her reverence for the earth itself.”

What have I left out? Well, everything in between the narrator’s arrival at the convent and her wrapping up with the memories of her dog and her mother. And perhaps that this book softly reminds the reader that whether we work overtly in trying to save the environment or whether we seem to recuse ourselves by withdrawing from the world, our salvation lies in a reverence for the earth. -PD

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.

Hardcover | 304 pages | 6.22" x 9.31"