Stone Yard Devotional
A Novel
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- $229.00
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- $229.00
Descripción editorial
A NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR
A WASHINGTON POST TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR
A LOS ANGELES TIMES TOP FIFTEEN BOOK OF THE YEAR
Shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize, a novel about forgiveness, grief, and what it means to be good, from the award-winning author of The Weekend.
“Stone Yard Devotional is as extraordinary as you’ve heard.” —The Washington Post
“An exquisite, wrenching novel of leaving your life behind.” —New York Times Book Review
"Meditative (but by no means uneventful)." —New York Times
"Riveting prose about how humans beat back despair."—Los Angeles Times
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. She doesn't believe in God, or know what prayer is, and finds herself living this strange, reclusive existence almost by accident.
But disquiet interrupts this secluded life with three visitations. First comes a terrible mouse plague, each day signaling a new battle against the rising infestation. Second is the return of the skeletal remains of a sister who disappeared decades before, presumed murdered. And finally, a troubling visitor plunges the narrator further back into her past.
Meditative, moving, and finely observed, Stone Yard Devotional is a seminal novel from a writer of rare power, exploring what it means to retreat from the world, the true nature of forgiveness, and the sustained effect of grief on the human soul.
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.
