Author(s): Charlotte Wood

Novel | Booker Prize 2024 long list | Australia | Booker Prize 2024 short list

Shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize

A deeply moving novel about forgiveness, grief, and what it means to be 'good', from the award-winning author of The Natural Way of Things and The Weekend.

A woman abandons her city life and marriage to return to the place she grew up, finding solace in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of the Monaro. She does not believe in God, doesn't know what prayer is, and finds herself living this strange, reclusive life almost by accident. As she gradually adjusts to the rhythms of monastic life, she ruminates on her childhood in the nearby town. She finds herself turning again and again to thoughts of her mother, whose early death she can't forget. 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 left the community decades before to minister to deprived women in Thailand - then disappeared, presumed murdered. Finally, a troubling visitor to the monastery pulls the narrator further back into her past. With each of these disturbing arrivals, the woman faces some deep questions. Can a person be truly good? What is forgiveness? Is loss of hope a moral failure? And can the business of grief ever really be finished?

A meditative and deeply moving novel from the Stella Prize-winning author of The Natural Way of Things and The Weekend.

 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
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 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 *
Beautiful writing: I loved The Weekend by the same author and this has a similar elegant style -- Joanne Finney * Good Housekeeping *
A slim novel which tackles weighty themes - guilt, loss, forgiveness - and manages to be both profound and addictively entertaining. I loved it -- Clare Chambers, bestselling author of SMALL PLEASURES
Quiet but weighty, Stone Yard Devotional is all about the complicated task of loving the world and its creatures. No words can quite convey how much I loved this book. I am just so happy to have read it -- Karen Joy Fowler, author of BOOTH
Beautiful, strange and otherworldly, Charlotte Wood's latest novel is an absorbing mediation on grief, forgiveness and our relationship to the natural world -- Paula Hawkins, no. 1 bestselling author of A SLOW FIRE BURNING
A slender novel which carries a weighty punch. So beautifully written, at times it felt like reading a lament on grief, guilt and responsibility. And it asks the most dangerous question of all: if you reduce a life down to its bare bones, what are you left with? Of what will you feel proud? Moving, searing and urgent, this book is stunning -- Araminta Hall, author of ONE OF THE GOOD GUYS
Intelligent and nourishing, Stone Yard Devotional shows us the mysteries of human relationships, asking who can and should bestow forgiveness. This novel is subtly powerful and utterly engrossing -- Claire Fuller, author of UNSETTLED GROUND
Remarkable - I'm still trying to figure out how she pulled it off. The best thing she's done -- Tim Winton, Books of the Year * Sydney Morning Herald *
Magnificent and radical . . . It gripped me from the opening line to the very last * Age *
A quiet, calm, very personal book at a time when we are all so overwhelmed with everything happening around us -- Elke Heidenreich * Spiegel *
Wood writes not only grippingly but in a lovingly ironic way about everything the monastery heroine experiences - and it's more than you'd expect * Flow *
Mesmeric -- Hannah Kent, Books of the Year * Sydney Morning Herald *
It's possible that some readers regarded Charlotte Wood's 2016 Stella Prize-winning The Natural Way of Things as the pinnacle of her writing career, but as it happens Wood was just getting warmed up . . . Wood's use of first person is reminiscent of Elizabeth Strout's Lucy novels; even the episodic structure seems to take inspiration from those books. But there are also echoes of Marilynne Robinson in that the narrator's self-scrutiny is involved in the question of what it means to live a moral life . . . In this extraordinary novel, everything resonates and becomes meaningful . . . It's difficult to understate the risks Wood has taken in constructing this book out of apparently minor events. But Stone Yard Devotional is a stunning work of fiction from a major writer who keeps getting better * Australian *
A book that extends and deepens Wood's already remarkable achievements as a novelist in powerful and often profound ways . . . It is a mark of Wood's sophistication as a writer that the novel does not attempt to resolve these contradictions. Instead it suggest that goodness is fraught and imperfect and that the bonds of love and obligation, kindness and cruelty that bind us to one another are written deep in our bodies, shaping us in ways we cannot ever fully escape or understand * Saturday Paper *
Wood's generous capacity for sustained attention is a gift to readers . . . Stone Yard Devotional invites the kind of contemplation and pause that is rare in a world of constant distraction. Its slow pace is counterbalanced by the shafts of meaning that fall right through Wood's lucid prose. Its stillness comes to feel less like a retreat and more like a radical practice, the soul-work of holding oneself accountable. If there is peace to be found here, it is hard won -- Jennifer Mills * Australian Book Review *