A Stone of Truth

The Silent Trials of Charlotte Wood's Stone Yard Devotional

Skimming words across her journal like she’s stone-skipping pebbles across a pond, an unnamed narrator lives, claiming to be an atheist, in a small abbey of Catholic nuns in New South Wales. But her story doesn’t have a pond. Instead, her undated journal entries offer boulder-sized questions about life's purpose. She enters the abbey not to believe, but to burn—to be reduced, atom by atom, until something incorruptible becomes her stone of truth.

In Charlotte Wood’s latest novel, Stone Yard Devotional, the setting is a parched, dusty religious retreat on the Monaro Plains. Aside from the narrator, no one has come to the retreat in years. One day, she returned for a fifth weekend visit and simply stayed. The story of this prayer community is stylized by the bone-dry elegance of Wood’s language. “We’ve done it deliberately; made ourselves foreign to ordinary life.” There’s no lushness here. Wood writes like a nun might pray—with precision, with silence, with a refusal to explain.

Wood’s language is austere and restrained, giving the reader a liminal spaciousness for contemplation. As a literary device, the journal form—undated and recursive—alters the reader’s sense of time and self. The narrator’s flashback memories scratch at our own: bullying in the schoolyard, feeling inadequate compared to parents, siblings, or peers.

Almost without noticing, we become submerged in the narrator’s three trials—or one might say, visitations. These trials begin with the return of Sister Jenny’s remains, many years after she was murdered in Thailand while working at a women's shelter. Accompanying the remains is Sister Helen Parry, now a celebrated climate activist. But the narrator recognizes Sister Helen as the girl she and her classmates once bullied for being poor and fatherless, often abandoned for weeks by her mother. And finally, the abbey is overrun by a plague of mice—an ancient omen turned calamity.

These trials don’t deliver epiphanies. There’s no radiant transformation, no singular moment when the narrator emerges healed. Yet, it is not only the narrator who needs healing—it is us, the readers, who must face the senseless violence, cruelty, and environmental collapse of our world. We’re living the “plague of mice,” and the only transformational path is to learn how to go within ourselves for the answers to why we’re here and what we value as part of a global community.

If the narrator is a hidden alchemist, her materials are not gold and salt but grief, silence, and spiritual fatigue. The abbey becomes her crucible, and the slow, circling journal entries are the fire beneath it. In refusing narrative resolution, Charlotte Wood grants the reader something rarer still: the freedom to dwell inside the devotional without demanding doctrine.

This is not a novel that answers; it accompanies. It lingers beside your uncertainties. Like the Moon—whose phases frame the book’s energy—it waxes, wanes, disappears, and returns. In the end, we are left not with clarity, but with a deeper attention. And that, too, is a sacred thing.

Keep journaling!