Stone Yard Devotional

Compared to Elizabeth Strout and Nora Ephron, Australia’s renowned author Charlotte Wood wows with a meditative novel that quiets the soul and has the mind and emotions whirring loudly.

In middle age, in a marriage that doesn't seem to be worth fighting for, and still reeling from the death of her mother, a woman goes back to her home in Australia and ends up staying in a nunnery. She is an atheist, so she is not lured by any religious duty or calling but by a deep need for silence and the space to contemplate.

Three unsettling visitations challenge her respite, the first being a mouse plague, the return of a sister's bones after presumably being murdered in Thailand, and finally, a visitor from her past that pulls her immediately back to childhood.

My dear friends at Three Lives Bookstore in NYC recommended this one, which was spot on and shortlisted for the Booker Prize.