Stone Yard Devotional

The new Booker-shortlisted novel by Charlotte Wood, the Stella Prize-winning author of The Natural Way of Things and The Weekend.
A fearless exploration of forgiveness, grief and the complicated beauty of female friendship.

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 the Australian outback. 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 signalling 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.

Review

I have rarely been so absorbed, so persuaded by a novel . . . Wood is a writer of the most intense attention. Everything here - the way mice move, the way two women pass each other a confiding look, the way a hero can love the world but also be brusque and inconsiderate to those around them - it all rings true. It's the story of a small group of people in a tiny town, but its resonance is global. This is a powerful, generous book -- Frank Cottrell-Boyce ― Guardian

Australian writer Charlotte Wood does for mice in her seventh novel what Alfred Hitchcock did for birds . . . Wood has said that she wanted to write about forgiveness, but there is little here by way of comfort. What the novel does instead is to force you to recognise your deepest fears about decay, extinction and suffering. It's a beautiful, mature work that does not flinch from life -- Johanna Thomas-Corr ― Sunday Times

A good read - intense, weird, brooding - and a fascinating look at the need to strip our lives back ― i paper

Unshowily explores forgiveness, accountability and despair in the face of the world's horrors -- The best fiction of 2024 ― Guardian

This is a transfixing novel about the way childhood events, be they seismic or seemingly banal, can haunt us in adulthood. Wood pares back her narrator's life and language to explore fundamental questions of loss, suffering and how we coexist with other people, other species and the environment, with a power and precision that means it will resonate with readers long after this year's Booker Prize has been awarded ― Financial Times

I'm a fan of Charlotte Wood and Stone Yard Devotional is my favourite - a character study in quiet strength -- Laura Jean McKay, Writers pick the best reads of 2024 ― Sydney Morning Herald

Stone Yard Devotional is 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, author of THE WREN, THE WREN

A beautiful and masterful book especially for its ability to dwell within the confusion and complexity of all that it is questioning, and for all of its quiet force ― Guardian

Wood's sentences are cool and carefully balanced, often working harder than they let on . . . Stone Yard Devotional is all the more accomplished for resisting neat conclusions, and recognising that even the examined life sits only 'on the edge of comprehension'. Wood may not be the first artist to embrace uncertainties, mysteries and doubts, but at its best her novel does it beautifully ― Sunday Telegraph

The book's steady directness has a cumulative force. As in The Weekend, Wood is tender but non-maudlin on the stuff that meets us all - illness, bereavement - as well as the knotty matter of guilt: here, the lofty question of how to live well is most often simply the difficulty of not messing up. Winningly no-nonsense stuff, highly recommended to anyone in a reading slump and 100% prizeworthy ― Observer

The seventh novel from Australian Charlotte Wood is set in a monastery in her home country during the pandemic, which might sound unpromising but for the beauty of her prose and ability to handle suspense ― Evening Standard

A brilliant premise . . . wry, unusual and beautifully written ― Daily Mail

Beautiful writing: I loved The Weekend by the same author and this has a similar elegant style -- Joanne Finney ― Good Housekeeping

About the Author

Charlotte Wood is the author of seven novels and three books of non-fiction. Her novel The Natural Way of Things won the 2016 Stella Prize, the Indie Book of the Year and Novel of the Year Awards, and was joint winner of the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Fiction. Her next novel, The Weekend, was an international bestseller and was shortlisted for the 2020 Stella Prize, the Prime Minister's Literary Award and the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. In 2019 she was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) and named one of the Australian Financial Review's 100 Women of Influence. Her features and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Guardian, Literary Hub and Sydney Morning Herald, among others. Charlotte lives in Sydney with her husband.