Reseña del libro "Stone Yard Devotional"
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2024
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 the Australian outback. She doesn't believe in God, or know what prayer is, and finds herself living this strange, reclusive existence almost by accident.
As she gradually adjusts to the rhythms of her new life, she finds herself turning again and again to thoughts of her mother, whose early death she can't forget.
But 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 disappeared decades before, presumed murdered. And finally, a troubling visitor plunges the narrator further back into her past.
MEDIA REVIEWS
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
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
