Stone Yard Devotional

A woman joins a cloister of nuns in rural Australia in this artful outing from Wood (The Weekend), which was a finalist for this year's Booker Prize. The unnamed narrator’s decision surprises her husband, from whom she is separated, as well as her friends and even herself, as she’s an atheist. In spare, unadorned prose, Wood weaves the narrator’s observations of the religious community’s day-to-day life in New South Wales with memories of the past, particularly of the narrator’s late mother. The plot is driven by a plague of mice at the abbey and the arrival of the remains of Sister Jenny, a former member who died while operating a women’s shelter in Thailand. Accompanying Sister Jenny’s bones is Sister Helen Parry, a famous environmentalist. Unbeknownst to the others, the narrator and Sister Helen Parry knew each other in high school, and their reunion brings up uneasy memories for both women. Woods’s exercise in restraint elides obvious questions of faith and the existence of God, instead offering subtle insights on the nature of forgiveness and grief. It’s an intriguingly secular tale of religious devotion. Agent: Pamela Malpas, Jennifer Lyons Literary. (Feb.)