Stone Yard Devotional
ABOUT
THE BOOK
A woman abandons her city life 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. 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 – then disappeared, presumed murdered. Finally, a visitor to the monastery pulls the narrator further back into her past.
NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS
Stone Yard Devotional is a work of quiet daring. It’s an Australian parable, almost gothic in sparseness. A woman, an atheist, visits a rural monastery and decides to move there. There are three ‘visitations’, in Wood’s own words, throughout the narrative, but largely the story unfolds untrammelled by theatrics – one Australian reviewer noted it was ‘just some women getting on with things.’ In the atmospheric spareness of the work there is room and time to consider significant questions of forgiveness and despair, but we are also reminded that the answers to these questions are complex and take a lifetime to consider. A lingering grief, not least of which has to do with a changing climate, hangs above the story. Escaping to a monastery might be perceived as a sort of retreat from catastrophe, but Wood writes with (and requires of the reader) a level of attention on par with Dillard’s Tinker at Pilgrim Creek, an earthly holiness built of the complex work of attending to life in its fullness.