Who hasn’t fantasised about abandoning their life responsibilities and running away to a different life?

After so many years of living in cities, the endlessness of the night sky here pours a wild, brilliant vertigo into me.

In Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional, that is what her protagonist does. She leaves her marriage and her job and runs to Monaro in New South Wales to live amongst nuns in a reclusive religious compound, despite being sceptical about religion.  

In her remaining life there was only room for the truth, and sometimes that would be brutal. It was sad, but it was too late; she had to prepare herself for what was to come. Only what was essential could be allowed to reach her now.

Our unnamed narrator applies herself to her daily tasks like scrubbing the floor with vigour and we become privy to her memories and flashbacks that indicate some kind of existential crisis. In the outside world covid and bushfires rage, while in the convent the focus is on a mouse plague, and the skeletal remains of a dead nun returned to her proper resting place

There may be a word in another language for what brought me to this place; to describe my particular kind of despair at that time. But I’ve never heard a word to express what I felt and what my body knew, which was that I had a need, an animal need, to find a place I had never been but which was still, in some undeniable way, my home.

Stone Yard Devotional is a meditation on escape, letting go, living with life’s choices, the nature of women’s friendships, belonging, devotion and sacrifice.

The beauty of being here is largely the silence, after all. Not having to explain, or endlessly converse.