Starred review from February 15, 2025
A woman abruptly exits her life for a cloistered religious community in this Australian novel that was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. The narrator's initial reasons for visiting the abbey are vague: She's tired; she wants to escape; her marriage is falling apart; she's still grieving her parents, dead for more than 35 years; she's disillusioned with her work in the environmental conservation movement. The predictability of the nuns' rituals turns out to be profoundly restorative. When Part II opens, the narrator has been at the abbey for four years. No one can make sense of her decision--not her husband, not her friends, not her colleagues who see her abdication as a lack of faith in their mission, and least of all the narrator herself, a self-described atheist, who explains, "I came back here one last time and then just...didn't go home." A plague of mice--an effect of climate change--the complicated logistics of trying to bring home the body of a murdered nun in the early days of the pandemic, and the return of a problematic figure from the narrator's past nudge the plot forward, but what's most gripping about the book isn't what happens but rather the narrator's quiet meditation on cruelty and kindness, love and forgiveness, our petty irritations with others and the process of allowing them to drift away. The "stone yard" in the title of Wood's novel is the name of a neighbor's sheep paddock. Devotion means love or loyalty; a devotional is a short worship service. 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.
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