Stone Yard Devotional
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2024 and One of the 10 Best Books of 2025 for the New York Times and Washington Post
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Beschreibung des Verlags
⭐ SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2024 ⭐
⭐ A NEW YORK TIMES '10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR' PICK ⭐
Washington Post's Top Ten Books of the Year 2025
Los Angeles Times 15 Best Books of 2025
New York Public Library's Books of the Year 2025
A Book of the Year 2024 for the Guardian, Sydney Morning Herald, ABC and BookRiot
'The fact that Stone Yard Devotional not only stays aloft but soars would seem to deny the laws of literary physics'
Ron Charles, Washington Post
'A beautiful, mature work that does not flinch from life'
Sunday Times
'Exquisite, wrenching'
New York Times
'I have rarely been so absorbed by a novel'
Guardian
'It leaves the reader feeling kinder, more brave, enlarged'
Anne Enright
Burnt out and in need of retreat, a middle-aged woman leaves Sydney to return to the place she grew up, taking refuge in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of rural Australia.
But disquiet soon interrupts this secluded life. First, the skeletal remains of a sister who disappeared decades before are returned to the monastery, resurfacing years of grief and pain. And then, an unexpected and troubling visitor plunges the narrator further into her past...
⭐ Shortlisted for the Victorian Premier's Literary Award
⭐ Shortlisted for The Age Book of the Year
⭐ Shortlisted for the ABIA Award for Literary Fiction
⭐ Longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A woman joins a cloister of nuns in rural Australia in this artful outing from Wood (The Weekend), which was a finalist for this year's Booker Prize. The unnamed narrator's decision surprises her husband, from whom she is separated, as well as her friends and even herself, as she's an atheist. In spare, unadorned prose, Wood weaves the narrator's observations of the religious community's day-to-day life in New South Wales with memories of the past, particularly of the narrator's late mother. The plot is driven by a plague of mice at the abbey and the arrival of the remains of Sister Jenny, a former member who died while operating a women's shelter in Thailand. Accompanying Sister Jenny's bones is Sister Helen Parry, a famous environmentalist. Unbeknownst to the others, the narrator and Sister Helen Parry knew each other in high school, and their reunion brings up uneasy memories for both women. Woods's exercise in restraint elides obvious questions of faith and the existence of God, instead offering subtle insights on the nature of forgiveness and grief. It's an intriguingly secular tale of religious devotion.
