Stone Yard Devotional: Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2024
Charlotte Wood
Oct 2023 · Sceptre · Narrated by Ailsa Piper
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6 hr 36 min
Unabridged
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LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2024
The new novel by Charlotte Wood, the Stella Prize-winning author of The Natural Way of Things and The Weekend.
A fearless exploration of forgiveness, grief and the complicated beauty of female friendship.
Burnt out and in need of retreat, a middle-aged woman leaves Sydney to return to the place she grew up, finding solace 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 ruminates on her childhood in the nearby town, 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.
'Both profound and addictively entertaining. I loved it'
CLARE CHAMBERS, bestselling author of Small Pleasures
'Beautiful, strange and otherworldly'
PAULA HAWKINS, bestselling author of A Slow Fire Burning
'Subtly powerful and utterly engrossing'
CLAIRE FULLER, bestselling author of Unsettled Ground
(P) 2023 Allen & Unwin
The new novel by Charlotte Wood, the Stella Prize-winning author of The Natural Way of Things and The Weekend.
A fearless exploration of forgiveness, grief and the complicated beauty of female friendship.
Burnt out and in need of retreat, a middle-aged woman leaves Sydney to return to the place she grew up, finding solace 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 ruminates on her childhood in the nearby town, 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.
'Both profound and addictively entertaining. I loved it'
CLARE CHAMBERS, bestselling author of Small Pleasures
'Beautiful, strange and otherworldly'
PAULA HAWKINS, bestselling author of A Slow Fire Burning
'Subtly powerful and utterly engrossing'
CLAIRE FULLER, bestselling author of Unsettled Ground
(P) 2023 Allen & Unwin
About the author
Charlotte Wood is the author of seven novels and three books of non-fiction. Her novel The Natural Way of Things won the 2016 Stella Prize, the Indie Book of the Year and Novel of the Year Awards, and was joint winner of the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Fiction. Her next novel, The Weekend, was an international bestseller and was shortlisted for the 2020 Stella Prize, the Prime Minister's Literary Award and the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. In 2019 she was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) and named one of the Australian Financial Review's 100 Women of Influence. Her features and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Guardian, Literary Hub and Sydney Morning Herald, among others. Charlotte lives in Sydney with her husband.
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