Book of the Week: STONE YARD DEVOTIONAL by Charlotte Wood

On short-listing Charlotte Wood’s STONE YARD DEVOTIONAL for the 2024 Booker Prize, the judges said: “Sometimes a visitor becomes a resident, and a temporary retreat becomes permanent. This happens to the narrator in Stone Yard Devotional — a woman with seemingly solid connections to the world who changes her life and settles into a monastery in rural Australia. Yet no shelter is impermeable. The past, in the form of the returning bones of an old acquaintance, comes knocking at her door; the present, in the forms of a global pandemic and a local plague of mice and rats, demands her attention. The novel thrilled and chilled the judges — it’s a book we can’t wait to put into the hands of readers.”