Please note that I had my facts wrong about Australian authors and the Booker Prize. I have revised the second sentence of my previous written and recorded post (please see below).
When I read that Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2024, I was not surprised. Wood is the first Australian to be shortlisted for the award since Richard Flanagan won the prize in 2014. It is a book for our time, a demonstration of the power of retreat from the outside world to a simpler one to reach what Charlotte Wood terms ‘bedrock’ and renewal.
We all sometimes long to step out of the fast-paced contemporary world to a simpler life in which we have the time and space to come to terms with what we have seen and experienced. In Stone Yard Devotional, Charlotte Wood takes us to a community of nuns, a haven for the unnamed protagonist of the novel, a middle-aged woman whose marriage is falling apart and who is grieving the death of her parents.
Far from being a grim or boring tale, Stone Yard Devotional is very entertaining. As readers, we accompany the main character as she discovers the quirks of the community’s residents, the pleasures and challenges of the quieter life, and major intrusions which force her into action and into confronting events of her past.
Written from the main character’s point of view, the novel comes across as an intensely personal account, told in short bursts of memory, reaction to current circumstances, feelings about the past, and observations. It mirrors the spare and honest fragments in which a journal might be written. The accumulation of these fragments slowly reveals why this woman has come to the community of nuns, why she has stayed despite her plans, and how it has led her to a greater understanding of herself.
The presentation of the story in small segments within the more traditional three-part structure makes this novel easy to read. Every segment is fascinating and will resonate with the lives of readers, especially middle-aged women. Because the segments touch on different aspects of the main character’s life and experience, they also increase the tension of the story in that revelations arrive slowly and in a cumulative manner. Highly recommended for the spare beauty of its writing and for its main character’s deep search for redemption.
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