Get thee from a nunnery: Review of 'Stone Yard Devotional' by Charlotte Wood

Nuns, Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote in her historical novel The Corner That Held Them, set in a 14th-century English convent, are “beings who are, in any case, much less interesting when seen from above than when studied sideways.” The nun at the center of Australian writer Charlotte Wood’s new novel, the 2024 Booker Prize-shortlisted Stone Yard Devotional, is interesting from all angles and in all narrative timeframes. Moreover, the convent she comes to call home takes the form of a sanctuary in which she reflects on the world and the life she left behind — and contemplates with growing unease the arrival of a person from her past.