Review: Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood

Following the breakdown of her marriage, a middle-aged woman returns to the town where she grew up on the Monaro Plains. She stays in a guest house run by nuns, eventually opting to become a permanent resident there (in spite of being an atheist). Three events will eventually force her to confront her past, a mouse plague, the discovery of the body of a sister who left the monastery many years previously and a visitor to the monastery who is none other than a girl that she bullied at the local high school many years before. 

Stone Yard Devotional is haunting and disturbing. It doesn't really go anywhere, though that hardly seems to be the point. Instead it is a look at how we are bound by our pasts and how, no matter hard we try, we can never truly escape it. That said, I did find this book underwhelming at times and that characters and situations never felt truly fleshed out to their full potential. Or maybe I missed the point. 

Other readers may have different feelings--as of August 2024 Stone Yard Devotional has been considered important enough to be long-listed for the Booker Prize, the first Australian novel to be so since 2016. 

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