Reading guide: Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood

A woman leaves behind her old life to join a spiritual retreat in rural Australia in Charlotte Wood’s fearless exploration of forgiveness, grief and female friendship

Whether you’re new to Stone Yard Devotional or have read it and would like to explore it more deeply, here is our comprehensive guide, featuring insights from critics, our judges and the book’s author, as well as discussion points and suggestions for further reading.

Published September 16, 2024

Synopsis

Burnt out and in need of retreat, a middle-aged woman leaves the big city to return to the area where she grew up, taking refuge in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of New South Wales. She doesn’t believe in God, yet finds herself living a strange, reclusive existence almost by accident. A temporary visit becomes something much more permanent.

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 member of the community who disappeared decades before, presumed murdered. And finally, a troubling visitor plunges the narrator further back into her past…

Buy the book

We benefit financially from any purchases you make when using the ‘Buy the book’ links.

The main characters

The narrator

The narrator, whose name is never revealed, has decided to give up her life – including her job and marriage – in Sydney for reasons that are unclear. She returns to rural New South Wales and takes shelter in a convent in her small hometown. An atheist, she doesn’t involve herself in the religious traditions of the convent, instead helping with everyday domestic duties.

Helen Parry

Helen Parry is a celebrated nun who lived in the same town as the narrator, attending the same school for a short time until a bullying event caused her to move away. After living overseas she comes back to the convent, accompanying the remains of a nun who was murdered.

About the author

Charlotte Wood lives in Sydney. She is the author of seven novels and three works of non-fiction. Her novel The Natural Way of Things won a number of Australian awards: 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.

Author Charlotte Wood — Charlotte Wood
*© Carly Earl*

What the critics said

Frank Cottrell-Boyce, The Guardian

‘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.’

Shady Cosgrove, The Conversation

‘Stone Yard Devotional offers line-by-line writing that haunts, and descriptions and ways of seeing the world that linger. The novel’s ideas and questions have made me consider the complicated nature of belonging as a woman in a patriarchal order where women are frequently pitted against each other, and how complicated female relationships can be.’

Astrid Edwards, The Times Literary Supplement

‘Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional is a novel of austere contemplation and personal devastation, its narrative driven by moral crisis rather than worldly action.’

Gemma Nisbet, The West Australian

‘Some readers may, I suspect, find Stone Yard Devotional more elusive than Wood’s previous two literary hits, The Natural Way of Things and The Weekend. But this is my favourite of her novels that I’ve yet read: written in beautifully understated prose, it’s intimate, engaging and willing to sit with the complexities of the timely questions it poses about community, forgiveness, the things we prefer not to see, and how to do — and be — “good”.’

Kim Forrester, Reading Matters

‘It feels like a memoir given all the anecdotes and recollections of childhood guilt and parental influences, coupled with diary entries that come right out of the Helen Garner school of observational writing. But I soon became hypnotised by the meditative prose and the clear-eyed self-analysis that pulls no punches. It’s a tale about being human and overcoming troubling emotions — grief, despair and guilt — so that we can heal, regain a sense of peace and move forward in life. I really enjoyed it and thought it most closely resembled Wood’s 2004 novel, The Submerged Cathedral, which I now believe was based on her mother’s life.’

What the Booker Prize judges said

‘The novel is set in a claustrophobic environment and reveals the vastness of human minds: the juxtaposition is so artfully done that a reader feels trusted by the author to be an intellectual partner in this exchange, rather than a passive recipient of stories and messages.

‘Contemporary issues – climate change and a global pandemic – can sometimes appear as flat concepts or stale ideas in fiction, but Stone Yard Devotional is able to make both topics locally and vividly felt as haunting human stories.’

The Booker Prize 2024 judges with the longlist
*©Tom Pilston*

What the author said

‘Stone Yard Devotional grew from elements of my own life and childhood merging with an entirely invented story about an enclosed religious community. Writing it during pandemic lockdowns, followed by a serious illness – and the way these twin upheavals demolished so many of our consoling certainties – gave me an urgent instinct to shed anything inessential in my work. I wanted nothing trivial, nothing insincere in this book. And I wanted to try to master what Saul Bellow called “stillness in the midst of chaos”, risking a tonal restraint and depth that at the same time, I hope, shimmers with energy.’

Read the full interview here.

Questions and discussion points

Stone Yard Devotional opens with an epigraph from songwriter Nick Cave: ‘I felt chastened by the world’. How does this quote set the tone for the novel, and in what ways does it resonate with the narrator’s journey as the story begins?

The novel is structured almost like a diary, providing a line-by-line account of the narrator’s activities and thoughts, along with their impact on her. How did this structure serve the story, and what effect did it have on the reading experience?

The narrator remains unnamed throughout the novel, and her life before arriving at the convent is only hinted at, through brief glimpses. Why do you think Wood chose to leave the specific details of the narrator’s past unexplored? How does this ambiguity shape your perception of her character, and do you think it contributes to her being seen as an unreliable narrator?

Despite living in a convent, it’s noted that the narrator is an atheist and never takes religious vows. Why do you think Wood made the narrator a non-believer, and how does this aspect of her character shape the novel’s exploration of faith and spirituality?

Johanna Thomas-Corr wrote in The Times that ‘Charlotte Wood does for mice in her seventh novel what Alfred Hitchcock did for birds,’ referring to the plague of rodents that serves as a backdrop to the story. Why do you think Wood chose to make this event a central theme? What symbolic meaning might it carry and what could it serve as a metaphor for in the novel’s larger narrative?

The Booker Prize judges highlighted that Stone Yard Devotional delves into climate grief and catastrophe, describing it as ‘the world we have to find a way to understand and the world we have to find a way to live in today and tomorrow’. In what ways does the novel convey these real-world experiences through relatable human stories? Does it make the themes of climate change and its impact accessible to readers?

While writing Stone Yard Devotional, Wood and her two sisters were diagnosed with cancer, an experience she described to ABC Australia as a ‘psychic calamity’ that made everything feel ‘more elemental, more rigorous and stringent’. She emphasised that she only included what truly mattered in the novel. (‘I wanted nothing extraneous in this book.’) Where do you see parallels between this deeply personal experience and the novel’s exploration of mortality and the stripping away of what is non-essential?

On a winter morning towards the end of the novel, the narrator reflects on the loss of her parents: ‘My inability to get over my parents’ deaths has been a source of lifelong shame to me […] I’m eternally stuck; a lumbering, crying, self-pitying child’. Why might the narrator feel ‘shame’ over this? In what ways do moments such as these shape the novel’s exploration of grief and forgiveness?

In an interview with the Booker Prizes, Wood said: ‘I wanted to try to master what Saul Bellow called “stillness in the midst of chaos”.’ To what extent do you think she mastered it?