Stone Yard Devotional, by Charlotte Wood

I picked up Stone Yard Devotional after reading Ron Charles’s rave review in The Washington Post (yes, I know how to get around their paywall), and I’m so glad I did. It turned out to be one of the best novels I’ve read all year — quiet, mysterious, and unexpectedly gripping in its calmness.

The unnamed narrator is a middle-aged woman who has retreated to a remote Catholic nunnery in Australia. She hasn’t exactly “found religion”; if anything, she’s allergic to it. She’s skeptical of the Church, rolls her eyes at the sisters who claim to have “fallen in love with Jesus,” and admits she’s an atheist. Yet she stays. And in that tension — between belief and unbelief, duty and detachment — the book finds its place.

The novel unfolds in short, precise reflections as she recounts daily monastic life (shoveling compost is the closest she gets to prayer), the long tail of her grief, and flashes of childhood that still haunt her. Wood writes these moments with such calm clarity that you don’t notice how deeply the story is pulling you in. It’s a quiet book, but never dull — there’s a dead nun in Bangkok, a climate-change-driven mouse plague chewing its way through the abbey, and the reappearance of a bullied classmate who has somehow become a “superstar nun.”

What moved me most were the pondering about mothers and daughters, and how grief refuses to follow a clean arc. The narrator’s relationship with her own mother is rendered with a tenderness that sneaks up on you, and the novel becomes, in many ways, a study of what we carry into adulthood and what we never quite put down.

It reminded me a bit of a meditation retreat: long stretches of silence punctuated by moments of raw, startling insight. By the end, the narrator achieves a kind of hard-won steadiness — not enlightenment, exactly, but something like acceptance.

Stone Yard Devotional is a small novel with a surprisingly long echo. Thoughtful, spare, and quietly devastating — the right book at the right time.