The copy I got of Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional came in large print, with ample space for underlining and bolded font in lieu of italics. It’s not uncommon practice: studies are coming around on large print as a means of making classwork more approachable – but for the older audiences for whom it’s chiefly designed, the ergonomics fit a spare, meditative book like this one better than most.

Drained by an eroded marriage and the rigors of her job protecting endangered species, an unnamed female narrator with no faith in God seeks peace in an isolated convent in New South Wales. A chain of “visitations,” starting from an outbreak of mice and continuing to the delivery of a nun’s long-lost bones by a troublemaker in the narrator’s youth, bends but doesn’t break the convent’s deep quiet.

The book’s shortlisting for the 2024 Booker Prize jumps out on the front cover more than anything will jump out at you on its pages. Nonetheless, Stone Yard Devotional exerts a rare emotional force for the nakedness and subtlety of its prose.

Stone Yard Devotional sets itself up like a Stephen King horror waiting to happen, except it never does. It drifts instead through anecdotal character portraits, past and present, as the narrator dotes on what led her here and what the other sisters can teach her about herself. How the regimen of daily journaling quickly erodes into shorter fragments might appeal to fans of Renata Adler’s Speedboat, though much less noisy and perhaps more carbon-neutral.

What the narrator learns from the convent, she refracts through memories of her deceased mother, a woman who often found more time to revere the soil than to take care of her daughter. “My mother used to hold out a heap of garden soil in two cupped hands, marvelling, calling me over to sniff and feel the moist black clumps, to see a pink work coiling from them,” the narrator reminisces. “Sometimes it seemed she loved the earth itself more than the plants.”

Outletting even the dirtiest intrusions of the peace to somber recollections of her past, Stone Yard Devotional seldom raises its pitch above a gentle conversation. The smell of a mouse nest rotting inside a piano recalls the narrator’s memory of her childhood piano teacher, disgraced for groping a boy during a lesson. A nun named Simone after the philosopher Simone Weil rebukes the narrator’s conception of prayer as “bullshit” – Simone says that it’s “hard labour” that “interrupt[s] your habitual thinking…admitting yourself into otherness” in a chapter that lasts two pages before shifting to Helen Parry roaming around the mouse paddocks.

Charlotte Wood masterfully dissolves her characters’ angers into the book’s flow, leaving the reader to tease out the unsaid, the forcibly repressed, the even truer stories scuttling underneath the rocks. She does this because she wholly trusts the reader. She holds up her end of the bargain through sentences that are both crystal-clear and cutting, persuading you to understand them.

Some nun’ arcs get a bit lost in the shuffle without finding a place to resolve, and the book’s closing moments feel underwhelming after an otherwise revelatory Part III. At a couple points I almost wished that certain conflicts and outbursts at the convent itself were given more oxygen to disrupt up the novel’s boundless patience.

But overall Stone Yard Devotional is a wondrous experience that, in spite of its pandemic framing, concerns itself less with the consequences of isolation than the twining inner lives of the sorts of people who’ve chosen it. The book sets a new high for Charlotte Wood as a chronicler of womanhood’s development, its shifting pressures, its tensions, its retreats.