Stone Yard Devotional

Picture
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?
New York Times 
10 Best Books of 2025

Shortlisted
​Victorian Premier's ​Literary Award
​2024


Shortlisted
Barbara Jefferis Award
​2024
Washington Post 
10 Best Books of 2025​

​Shortlisted
The Booker Prize
2024


Longlisted
The Dublin Literary Award
2025​
Los Angeles Times 
​15 Best Books of 2025 

Shortlisted
The Age Book of the Year
2024


​Shortlisted
Prime Minister's Literary Award for Fiction
2024
 'A quiet novel of immense power ... I have rarely been so absorbed, so persuaded by a novel ... 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.’
- Frank Cottrell Boyce, Guardian UK
​‘A beautiful, mature work that does not flinch from life.’
- Johanna Thomas-Corr, Sunday Times ​
​This magnificent, radical novel ... gripped me from the opening line to the very last.' 
​- Helen Elliott, SMH/The Age
 'Wood’s generous capacity for sustained attention is a gift to readers ...  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.'
​- Jennifer Mills, Australian Book Review
'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.'
- Max Liu, The Financial Times
“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. . . A fierce and philosophical interrogation of history, memory, nature, and human existence.”
— Booker Prize judges
A novel of austere contemplation and personal devastation, its narrative driven by moral crisis rather than worldly action …. reflections on mortality seep into its fabric. For this is not a book of answers. Rather, it is a challenge: about how to be in the world, and how to be alone.”
​- Astrid Edwards, Times Literary Supplement
“Wood threads a contemplative path for believers and nonbelievers alike. Reading her prose—sanded to deceptive simplicity—feels like spending time with a dear friend. What if attentiveness and “habitual kindness,” the narrator seems to ask, are bedrocks of a moral life? A wise, consoling novel for disquieting times.” 
– Kirkus (STARRED REVIEW)
'What’s attractive about Stone Yard Devotional is that it’s unsure, or won’t flag up, what it’s about. For Wood, being in charge means going where she doesn’t expect to go, away from the surtext ... Over the past decade Wood’s versatility has taken her from the dystopian The Natural Way of Things through the comic The Weekend to the meditative monasticism of Stone Yard Devotional. Themes do recur: animals, church, climate change. But she doesn’t repeat herself. And though she refrained from calling her novel Of Mice and Women, no one has written so well about rodents.'
- Blake Morrison, London Review of Books
“Founded on the same rock of introspection that anchors the Gilead series….Stone Yard Devotional not only stays aloft but soars… A strange sense of engagement with these pages gives way to sheer gratitude for the chance to be in the presence of such restraint and wisdom.” 
​– Ron Charles, Washington Post
'A stunning work of fiction from a major writer who keeps getting better.'
- Gretchen Shirm, The Australian
'A book that extends and deepens Wood’s already remarkable achievements as a novelist in powerful and often profound ways.'
- James Bradley, The Saturday Paper 
​'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.'
​- Fiona Wright, ​Guardian Australia
​'I loved Wood's Devotional - a very pure, plain-sung story involving nuns and mice (indeed, I remember that combination so fondly from school), it has a beautiful melancholy for the world. Which sounds a bit po-faced when it isn't. Also, technically, one of the best time shifts I have read in years, between sections 1 and 2. No lie - I gasped.'
- Anne Enright, Instagram @thewrengirl
'Remarkable - I'm still trying to figure out how she pulled it off. The best thing she's done.'
 ​- Tim Winton, author

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