A woman abandons her city life and marriage to return to the place of her childhood, holing up 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 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?
Source: Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood
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I had not read any of Charlotte Wood’s work, but was inspired by The Minefield podcast.
Stone Yard Devotional is situated in the world, set in an enclosed religious community in the Monaro plain in regional New South Wales, capturing elements of climate change with the mouse plague, while also still living through the coronavirus pandemic. However, this helps to touch on the ageless elements of the story that encourage introspection, from despair, shame, grief and legacy.
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.
Source: Charlotte Wood
It was a strange book that had me thinking about those choices at schools that did not age well. I think that Shady Cosgrove captures it best in suggesting that it is a ‘novel of questions’:
This is a novel of questions. How does the past ripple into the present? How do we live with our past actions? What is the nature of forgiveness? What is the nature of religious belief? How might we understand experiences of the spiritual?
I think, ultimately, it’s a story of memory and sacrifice. It asks what we do and don’t remember of our pasts. And it asks: what are we willing to give up in the name of our life’s purpose?
Source: Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional poses big questions about goodness, purpose and sacrifice by Shady Cosgrove
For a book often sparse with action (other than the mice), I feel that it will be one of those books that will sit with me for quite awhile. I wonder if there is something about space of the landscape, the slowness of living, that is what invites us in?
Marginalia
DAY TWO
During Lauds I found I was thinking, But how do they get anything done? All these interruptions day in, day out, having to drop what you’re doing and toddle into church every couple of hours. Then I realised: it’s not an interruption to the work; it is the work. This is the doing.
Surely, if God exists, He could not approve of all this rubbish. Yet I have brought with me, quite against the spirit of the place, my own rubbish – blocks of chocolate, packages of salted peanuts, blueberries in a plastic carton, coffee, wine. He probably wouldn’t approve of that either.
PART II
What struck me in the forest, and does now, is how nothing appeared to have changed in Helen Parry; how the things we schoolgirls so hated her for were exactly the qualities that now gave her such unsettling power. The unashamed demand for space. The way her clothes sat on her body, the animal carnality of her. Her unwavering, absolute readiness for a fight.
I have never forgotten that strange feeling, left standing there in the wilderness with my regret and my remorse still around me, suspended in the air. Not denounced, not forgiven. It made me admire her, if I am honest, this refusal to alleviate my discomfort. It made me wonder what forgiveness actually is, or means. What was it that I wanted from her that day?
The way she remained utterly herself, hiding nothing, this made me admire her too. And now that she’s coming here, into our silence, it also makes me afraid.
PART III
Nobody knows the subterranean lives of families.
Commentary
How would you summarise this book in a sentence to encourage readers to pick it up?
Stone Yard Devotional is about one woman’s inward journey to make sense of the world and her life when conflicts and chaos are abundant in both realms. Set in a monastery in rural Australia, the novel is a fierce and philosophical interrogation of history, memory, nature, and human existence.
Is there something unique about this book, something that you haven’t encountered in fiction before?
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.  ​
What do you think it is about this book that readers will not only admire, but really love?
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.
Can you tell us about any particular characters that readers might connect with, and why?
The protagonist, a middle-aged woman with seemingly unbreakable connections to the world – a career, a life partner, a solid place in life – decides to leave everything behind and seek a different life in a religious retreat. This measure, though drastic, may speak to many readers who are beset by a life that is livable but missing something.  ​
Although it’s a work of fiction, is there anything about it that’s especially relevant to issues we’re confronting in today’s world?
The novel is set in the pandemic. The characters face the concrete and horrendous realities of climate change – unbearable heat and a rodent plague. The backdrop of the novel is 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.
Source: Charlotte Wood
I thought this was a book about grief and legacy – how we remember our parents, how they shape us, how we live for and against their values.
Source: Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional poses big questions about goodness, purpose and sacrifice by Shady Cosgrove
this is not a fast-moving page-turner. It’s a text that invites introspection and pondering. Wood writes novels that are important to read. I think about the world in different ways after her characters have entered my consciousness. But her books won’t be hurried – they take their time.
Source: Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional poses big questions about goodness, purpose and sacrifice by Shady Cosgrove
This is a novel of questions. How does the past ripple into the present? How do we live with our past actions? What is the nature of forgiveness? What is the nature of religious belief? How might we understand experiences of the spiritual?
I think, ultimately, it’s a story of memory and sacrifice. It asks what we do and don’t remember of our pasts. And it asks: what are we willing to give up in the name of our life’s purpose?
Source: Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional poses big questions about goodness, purpose and sacrifice by Shady Cosgrove
Stone Yard Devotional (2023) is about a middle-aged woman alone and struggling with existential questions about goodness, forgiveness, hope and despair. Indeed, this meditation on the life that’s been lived reads more like an extended examination of conscience than anything else.
Source: Stone Yard Devotional (2023), by Charlotte WoodBy Lisa Hill
Stone Yard devotional is a quiet and warm-hearted read, one that asks its readers to not rush ahead looking for a plot, but to think about the deeper things that confront us all at one time or another.
Source: Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard devotional (#BookReview)By Whispering Gums
The irony of the narrator turning to a convent in despair is that for Catholics despair is the unforgivable sin. In interviews Wood has referred to these three incidents – the bones, the mice, the return of Parry – as “visitations”, as if they were tests, like the temptations in the desert. These tests throw up all kinds of possibilities: about how we might live with the damage we’ve done, about how there might be solace and even meaning in service and observance, about how though we are broken, we might still be of use.
Source: Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood review – a quiet novel of immense powerBy Frank Cottrell-Boyce