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SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2024
The new novel by the bestselling author of The Weekend

A Book of the Year for the Guardian, Sydney Morning Herald and ABC

‘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

Publisher Review

A beautiful and masterful book especially for its ability to dwell within the confusion and complexity of all that it is questioning, and for all of its quiet force * Guardian * A slim novel which tackles weighty themes – guilt, loss, forgiveness – and manages to be both profound and addictively entertaining. I loved it — Clare Chambers, bestselling author of SMALL PLEASURES Quiet but weighty, Stone Yard Devotional is all about the complicated task of loving the world and its creatures. No words can quite convey how much I loved this book. I am just so happy to have read it — Karen Joy Fowler, author of BOOTH Beautiful, strange and otherworldly, Charlotte Wood’s latest novel is an absorbing mediation on grief, forgiveness and our relationship to the natural world — Paula Hawkins, no. 1 bestselling author of A SLOW FIRE BURNING A slender novel which carries a weighty punch. So beautifully written, at times it felt like reading a lament on grief, guilt and responsibility. And it asks the most dangerous question of all: if you reduce a life down to its bare bones, what are you left with? Of what will you feel proud? Moving, searing and urgent, this book is stunning — Araminta Hall, author of ONE OF THE GOOD GUYS Intelligent and nourishing, Stone Yard Devotional shows us the mysteries of human relationships, asking who can and should bestow forgiveness. This novel is subtly powerful and utterly engrossing — Claire Fuller, author of UNSETTLED GROUND Remarkable – I’m still trying to figure out how she pulled it off. The best thing she’s done — Tim Winton, Books of the Year * Sydney Morning Herald * Magnificent and radical . . . It gripped me from the opening line to the very last * Age * A quiet, calm, very personal book at a time when we are all so overwhelmed with everything happening around us — Elke Heidenreich * Spiegel * Wood writes not only grippingly but in a lovingly ironic way about everything the monastery heroine experiences – and it’s more than you’d expect * Flow * Mesmeric — Hannah Kent, Books of the Year * Sydney Morning Herald * It’s possible that some readers regarded Charlotte Wood’s 2016 Stella Prize-winning The Natural Way of Things as the pinnacle of her writing career, but as it happens Wood was just getting warmed up . . . Wood’s use of first person is reminiscent of Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy novels; even the episodic structure seems to take inspiration from those books. But there are also echoes of Marilynne Robinson in that the narrator’s self-scrutiny is involved in the question of what it means to live a moral life . . . In this extraordinary novel, everything resonates and becomes meaningful . . . It’s difficult to understate the risks Wood has taken in constructing this book out of apparently minor events. But Stone Yard Devotional is a stunning work of fiction from a major writer who keeps getting better * Australian * A book that extends and deepens Wood’s already remarkable achievements as a novelist in powerful and often profound ways . . . It is a mark of Wood’s sophistication as a writer that the novel does not attempt to resolve these contradictions. Instead it suggest that goodness is fraught and imperfect and that the bonds of love and obligation, kindness and cruelty that bind us to one another are written deep in our bodies, shaping us in ways we cannot ever fully escape or understand * Saturday Paper * Wood’s generous capacity for sustained attention is a gift to readers . . . Stone Yard Devotional invites the kind of contemplation and pause that is rare in a world of constant distraction. Its slow pace is counterbalanced by the shafts of meaning that fall right through Wood’s lucid prose. Its stillness comes to feel less like a retreat and more like a radical practice, the soul-work of holding oneself accountable. If there is peace to be found here, it is hard won — Jennifer Mills * Australian Book Review * PRAISE FOR CHARLOTTE WOOD’S THE WEEKEND

A Sunday Times ‘Best books for summer 2021’ | A Times, Guardian and Daily Mail paperback pick | A Times, Observer, Independent, Daily Express and Good Housekeeping book of the year

‘The Weekend is so great I am struggling to find the words to do it justice’
Marian Keyes

‘A lovely, lively, intelligent, funny book’
Tessa Hadley

‘A rare pleasure’
Sunday Times

‘Glorious… Charlotte Wood joins the ranks of writers such as Nora Ephron, Penelope Lively and Elizabeth Strout’
Guardian

‘These women are so alive on the page, it is impossible not to feel a kinship and intimacy with each of them’
Daily Express