Stone Yard Devotional
On sale
7th March 2024
Price: £16.99
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2024: THE NEW NOVEL BY THE AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR OF THE WEEKEND
A Guardian Book of the Summer 2024
A Book of the Year for the Sydney Morning Herald and ABC
Shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award
Shortlisted for The Age Book of the Year
Shortlisted for the ABIA Award for Literary Fiction
Longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award
‘A beautiful, mature work that does not flinch from life’
SUNDAY TIMES
‘A transfixing novel’
FINANCIAL TIMES
‘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 by a novel . . . A powerful, generous book’
GUARDIAN
‘Beautiful, strange and otherworldly’
PAULA HAWKINS, bestselling author of A Slow Fire Burning
‘It extends and deepens Wood’s already remarkable achievements as a novelist in powerful and often profound ways’
SATURDAY PAPER
‘Both profound and addictively entertaining. I loved it’
CLARE CHAMBERS, bestselling author of Small Pleasures
‘Extraordinary . . . a stunning work of fiction from a major writer who keeps getting better’
AUSTRALIAN
‘Remarkable . . . I’m still trying to figure out how she pulled it off. The best thing she’s done’
TIM WINTON, author of The Shepherd’s Hut
‘No words can quite convey how much I loved this book’
KAREN JOY FOWLER, author of Booth
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.
PRAISE FOR CHARLOTTE WOOD’S THE WEEKEND
A Sunday Times ‘Best Book for Summer 2021’
A Times, Observer, Independent, Daily Express and Good Housekeeping Book of the Year
‘So great I am struggling to find the words to do it justice . . . Wood is an agonisingly gifted writer. I am now going to read all her other books’
MARIAN KEYES
‘A rare pleasure’
SUNDAY TIMES
‘A perfect, funny, insightful novel about women, friendship and ageing’
NINA STIBBE
‘Glorious . . . Charlotte Wood joins the ranks of writers such as Nora Ephron, Penelope Lively and Elizabeth Strout’
GUARDIAN
‘Riveting’
ELIZABETH DAY
‘Triumphantly brings to life the honest inner lives of women’
INDEPENDENT
‘A lovely, lively, intelligent, funny book’
TESSA HADLEY
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Reviews
PRAISE FOR CHARLOTTE WOOD'S THE WEEKEND
A Sunday Times 'Best books for summer 2021' | A Times, Guardian and Daily Mail paperback pick | A Times, Observer, Independent, Daily Express and Good Housekeeping book of the year
'The Weekend is so great I am struggling to find the words to do it justice'
Marian Keyes
'A lovely, lively, intelligent, funny book'
Tessa Hadley
'A rare pleasure'
Sunday Times
'Glorious... Charlotte Wood joins the ranks of writers such as Nora Ephron, Penelope Lively and Elizabeth Strout'
Guardian
'These women are so alive on the page, it is impossible not to feel a kinship and intimacy with each of them'
Daily Express
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
A slim novel which tackles weighty themes - guilt, loss, forgiveness - and manages to be both profound and addictively entertaining. I loved it
Beautiful, strange and otherworldly, Charlotte Wood's latest novel is an absorbing mediation on grief, forgiveness and our relationship to the natural world
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
Remarkable - I'm still trying to figure out how she pulled it off. The best thing she's done
Magnificent and radical . . . It gripped me from the opening line to the very last
A quiet, calm, very personal book at a time when we are all so overwhelmed with everything happening around us
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
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
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
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
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
Mesmeric
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
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
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
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
Beautiful writing: I loved The Weekend by the same author and this has a similar elegant style
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
A brilliant premise . . . wry, unusual and beautifully written
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
A quietly extraordinary novel. The narrative is stripped to bedrock and yet, paradoxically, is as complex and fertile as the compost that forms one of its primary metaphors
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
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
A good read - intense, weird, brooding - and a fascinating look at the need to strip our loves back