I was so tired, but the mess on my bed—the same congestion into which I had nightly crawled without noticing—was suddenly intolerable to me. I yanked at the sheet and the motion sent everything to the carpet. I lifted the sheet with two hands and it billowed slowly back down, and as it did I felt some otherworldly possibility open up inside myself. I picked up one of the pillows from the floor and placed it back on the bed, smoothed the sheet down to make a flat, empty expanse. I stood looking at the bed and breathing. It isn’t something I ever told anyone—how could you say this?—but the lift and descent of that sheet, the air inside it, the peace when it settled, showed me what I wanted. I knew it in that moment, but it took years to find it.

The first time the narrator of Stone Yard Devotional visits the nuns in their remote community, she just wants to get away for a while. She isn’t religious herself, and the nuns’ routines interest but do not really engage her. “What is the meaning of this ancient Hebrew bombast about enemies and borders and persecution,” she wonders; “what’s the point of their singing about it day after day after day?” How do they get anything done, she frets, with the constant interruptions,

having to drop what you’re doing and toddle into church every couple of hours. Then I realised: it’s not an interruption to the work; it is the work. This is the doing.

As she settles into the strangeness of it, she feels “a great restfulness” come over her:

Is it to do with being almost completely passive, yet still somehow a participant? Or perhaps it’s simply owed to being somewhere so quiet; a place entirely dedicated to silence. In the contemporary world, this kind of stillness feels radical. Illicit.

She goes home after this visit, but she comes back again, and this time she stays.

Stone Yard Devotional both was and was not what I expected. It is a call to radical stillness, or at least an invocation of the possibilities that a deliberate retreat from the noisy chaos (literal, emotional) of modern life might offer: clarity, insight, simplicity. But it does not idealize or romanticize its alternative, or press us towards prayer or faith or even a vague spirituality. It isn’t uplifting; it doesn’t aspire to or encourage transcendence. Its nuns are still very much people, for one thing. People have histories, relationships, idiosyncrasies, disagreements, responsibilities. Work has to get done: people need to eat, animals need to be cared for, or killed and eaten—or just killed, as many of them as possible, if they are the mice who overrun the nuns’ buildings, destroying food, appliances, musical instruments, cars, sleep. I did not expect there to be so many mice—or for them to be so literally mice. For a book that in some ways is “otherworldly,” Stone Yard Devotional seemed to me very much about this world, its characters very much earthbound. I thought about whether the mice were metaphors: the best I can do is that they could represent just that worldliness, the persistent recurrence of the things we try hardest to shut out. But mostly I feel like they were just mice, there to show us that you can’t really retreat—you still have to deal with things.

The things the narrator is dealing with certainly follow her, and she brings them to us through her memories and reflections. Then the nuns have a visitor, Helen Parry, who belongs to the narrator’s previous life. She had not treated Helen well then, and their new proximity becomes an opportunity for her to try to make amends and then to be a support and a witness as Helen moves towards a reckoning with her own sorrows. Helen initially comes to the nuns’ community in attendance on the remains of one of their number who went away to do some missionary work and was murdered. The return of her body for burial brings a kind of closure to the nuns who knew her before.

It wasn’t always clear to me as I read the novel why it had the specific pieces in it that it did (and of course I have not itemized them all here, though it is not a plot-heavy book). Sometimes when I’m reading a novel, even for the first time, I feel a gathering sense of its unity as I go along, of what holds it together for me. Other times if I work at it for a bit patterns emerge—sometimes, this happens while I am writing about it here! It’s likely that if I reread Stone Yard Devotional the ideas that connect its various elements would become clearer: I expect they would, because the novel feels so deliberate, so thoughtful. What did hold it together for me was its tone, or voice. I liked the way the narrator thought and talked. Often she leads herself, and thus us, along an unassuming narrative thread until she arrives somewhere quietly meaningful. Here’s an example:

At first I was struck—a little irritated, honestly, by how slowly the women spoke here, by the long pauses they gave before responding to any question or remark. It seemed affected. But then I recalled a long trip across the country when I was a young woman, driving with my friends from the east coast to the west and back again, twice across the Nullarbor, camping each night along the way. It took a month, and during that month we became slower and slower in our movements. At first we would drive long distances, set up camp in the dusk, rise very early the next day to pack up and move on. But by the end of the trip we would drive only three or four hours a day, and we took longer to do everything. Packed up later and later in the mornings. When at last we drove back into the inner city we were frightened by the speed of everything, by how loudly people spoke. Waiters seemed to be shouting when they came to take your order for dinner.

“I don’t think,” she says, “I have ever again felt as free as I did on that drive across the desert. Except here. Once or twice here I have felt it.”

There is loss and grief and trauma in the novel, because there is in people’s lives, and I liked the way she talked about that too. She recalls visiting her doctor after her parents’ deaths and appreciating her “deep, practical kindness”:

On my second visit, I remarked (embarrassed again by my tears) that it seemed my friends were deserting me, just when I needed them the most. She was unsurprised. Your life has been stripped down to bedrock, she said. It’s not their fault; their lives are protected by many layers of cushioning, and they can’t understand or acknowledge this difference between you. It probably frightens them. They’re not trying to hurt you.

Later, thinking about another tragedy, she comments,

I used to think there was a ‘before’ and ‘after’ most things that happen to a person; that a fence of time and space could separate even quite catastrophic experience from the ordinary whole of life. But now I know that with a great devastation of some kind, there is no before or after. Even when the commotion of crisis has settled, its still there, like that dam water, insisting, seeping, across the past and the future.

It’s not revelatory writing, or even particularly writerly writing, but its directness and lack of complication is both calm and calming.

I’m really just wandering back through the novel looking at the passages I marked rather than going anywhere in particular with these comments about it. It has not been a particularly quiet few days since I read the novel; it has been hard to think at all, really, much less in the way I probably need to to do a better, or at least a different, job of this post. After I finished it on Saturday I commented on Bluesky that I was going to have to sit with it for a while, and that I expected it would stick with me. I still feel that way about my reading experience—that it remains a bit unfinished. I really liked the novel. I read it all at once, in a couple of hours (it’s not a very dense or difficult read); I never wanted to put it down, or to pick up my phone instead, which is a rarity nowadays. Somehow, for all that it is full of mundane activity and also tensions and sorrows, it created a kind of retreat for me in the moment. That is a kind of unity, I suppose, between its form and its content, a congruence between style and substance. And although I said it is not a novel that doesn’t aim at transcendence, it does have some moments of grace:

Just when the misery of the mice, the drudgery and boredom of the days here feels intolerable, there is Dolores’s pure, clear voice carrying across the courtyard as she practises alone in the church. I return to the peeling and coring of apples and find my work has become new, and beautiful.