Stone Yard Devotional

Stone Yard Devotional opens with an epigraph from songwriter Nick Cave: ‘I felt chastened by the world’. How does this quote set the tone for the novel, and in what ways does it resonate with the narrator’s journey as the story begins?

The novel is structured almost like a diary, providing a line-by-line account of the narrator’s activities and thoughts, along with their impact on her. How did this structure serve the story, and what effect did it have on the reading experience?

The narrator remains unnamed throughout the novel, and her life before arriving at the convent is only hinted at, through brief glimpses. Why do you think Wood chose to leave the specific details of the narrator’s past unexplored? How does this ambiguity shape your perception of her character, and do you think it contributes to her being seen as an unreliable narrator?

Despite living in a convent, it’s noted that the narrator is an atheist and never takes religious vows. Why do you think Wood made the narrator a non-believer, and how does this aspect of her character shape the novel’s exploration of faith and spirituality?

Johanna Thomas-Corr wrote in The Times that ‘Charlotte Wood does for mice in her seventh novel what Alfred Hitchcock did for birds,’ referring to the plague of rodents that serves as a backdrop to the story. Why do you think Wood chose to make this event a central theme? What symbolic meaning might it carry and what could it serve as a metaphor for in the novel’s larger narrative?

The Booker Prize judges highlighted that Stone Yard Devotional delves into climate grief and catastrophe, describing it as ‘the world we have to find a way to understand and the world we have to find a way to live in today and tomorrow’. In what ways does the novel convey these real-world experiences through relatable human stories? Does it make the themes of climate change and its impact accessible to readers?

While writing Stone Yard Devotional, Wood and her two sisters were diagnosed with cancer, an experience she described to ABC Australia as a ‘psychic calamity’ that made everything feel ‘more elemental, more rigorous and stringent’. She emphasised that she only included what truly mattered in the novel. (‘I wanted nothing extraneous in this book.’) Where do you see parallels between this deeply personal experience and the novel’s exploration of mortality and the stripping away of what is non-essential?

On a winter morning towards the end of the novel, the narrator reflects on the loss of her parents: ‘My inability to get over my parents’ deaths has been a source of lifelong shame to me […] I’m eternally stuck; a lumbering, crying, self-pitying child’. Why might the narrator feel ‘shame’ over this? In what ways do moments such as these shape the novel’s exploration of grief and forgiveness?

In an interview with the Booker Prizes, Wood said: ‘I wanted to try to master what Saul Bellow called “stillness in the midst of chaos”.’ To what extent do you think she mastered it?