Charlotte Wood is the author of seven novels and three books of non-fiction. Her novel Stone Yard Devotional was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. Earlier novels include The Natural Way of Things, which won the 2016 Stella Prize and was joint winner of the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Fiction, and The Weekend, which was an international bestseller. Her features and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Guardian, Literary Hub and Sydney Morning Herald, among others. Charlotte lives in Sydney with her husband.
It's just as extraordinary as the whispers from abroad suggested .
. . the quiet, intensely private voice of Stone Yard Devotional
feels more intimate than a library of confessional novels . . .
Wood has developed a style that relies on dislocation,
juxtaposition and elision to suggest the currents of spiritual
turmoil and resolution. A lesser artist would push too hard for
tenderness, for meaning, for what Hemingway called "fake" mysticism
. . . Ultimately, a strange sense of engagement with these pages
gives way to sheer gratitude for the chance to be in the presence
of such restraint and wisdom
*Washington Post*
I have rarely been so absorbed, so persuaded by a novel . . . Wood
is a writer of the most intense attention. Everything here - the
way mice move, the way two women pass each other a confiding look,
the way a hero can love the world but also be brusque and
inconsiderate to those around them - it all rings true. It's the
story of a small group of people in a tiny town, but its resonance
is global. This is a powerful, generous book
*Guardian*
An exquisite, wrenching novel of leaving your life behind . . .
Activism, abdication, atonement, grace: In this novel no one of
these paths is holier than another; Wood is more invested in
noticing the human pursuit of holiness itself
*New York Times*
[Wood's] exquisite meditations on dread and disillusionment about
the future, familiar to many of us, had, for me, a heartening and
consoling force.
*The New Yorker*
Australian writer Charlotte Wood does for mice in her seventh novel
what Alfred Hitchcock did for birds . . . Wood has said that she
wanted to write about forgiveness, but there is little here by way
of comfort. What the novel does instead is to force you to
recognise your deepest fears about decay, extinction and suffering.
It's a beautiful, mature work that does not flinch from life
*Sunday Times*
A good read - intense, weird, brooding - and a fascinating look at
the need to strip our lives back
*i paper*
Unshowily explores forgiveness, accountability and despair in the
face of the world's horrors
*Guardian*
This is a transfixing novel about the way childhood events, be they
seismic or seemingly banal, can haunt us in adulthood. Wood pares
back her narrator's life and language to explore fundamental
questions of loss, suffering and how we coexist with other people,
other species and the environment, with a power and precision that
means it will resonate with readers long after this year's Booker
Prize has been awarded
*Financial Times*
I'm a fan of Charlotte Wood and Stone Yard Devotional is my
favourite - a character study in quiet strength
*Sydney Morning Herald*
Stone Yard Devotional is a book about what it means to be good:
simply and with great humility, it asks the big questions, leaving
the reader feeling kinder, more brave, enlarged
*Anne Enright, author of THE WREN, THE WREN*
A beautiful and masterful book especially for its ability to dwell
within the confusion and complexity of all that it is questioning,
and for all of its quiet force
*Guardian*
Wood's sentences are cool and carefully balanced, often working
harder than they let on . . . Stone Yard Devotional is all the more
accomplished for resisting neat conclusions, and recognising that
even the examined life sits only 'on the edge of comprehension'.
Wood may not be the first artist to embrace uncertainties,
mysteries and doubts, but at its best her novel does it
beautifully
*Sunday Telegraph*
The book's steady directness has a cumulative force. As in The
Weekend, Wood is tender but non-maudlin on the stuff that meets us
all - illness, bereavement - as well as the knotty matter of guilt:
here, the lofty question of how to live well is most often simply
the difficulty of not messing up. Winningly no-nonsense stuff,
highly recommended to anyone in a reading slump and 100%
prizeworthy
*Observer*
The seventh novel from Australian Charlotte Wood is set in a
monastery in her home country during the pandemic, which might
sound unpromising but for the beauty of her prose and ability to
handle suspense
*Evening Standard*
A brilliant premise . . . wry, unusual and beautifully written
*Daily Mail*
Beautiful writing: I loved The Weekend by the same author and this
has a similar elegant style
*Good Housekeeping*
A slim novel which tackles weighty themes - guilt, loss,
forgiveness - and manages to be both profound and addictively
entertaining. I loved it
*Clare Chambers, bestselling author of SMALL PLEASURES*
Wood is a fantastic writer . . . I really enjoyed it, and it made
me think about faith and religion, lots of questions that I've
found myself thinking about in different ways over time. So it
resonates on lots of levels
*Five Books*
Something rare: a jewel-like, introspective novel in which not all
that much happens, yet worlds are revealed . . . With its absorbing
and deceptively simple narrative, Stone Yard Devotional is a
beautiful testament to the rudiments of shedding the unessential
and living a life of intention
*BookPage*
Quiet but weighty, Stone Yard Devotional is all about the
complicated task of loving the world and its creatures. No words
can quite convey how much I loved this book. I am just so happy to
have read it
*Karen Joy Fowler, author of BOOTH*
Beautiful, strange and otherworldly, Charlotte Wood's latest novel
is an absorbing mediation on grief, forgiveness and our
relationship to the natural world
*Paula Hawkins, no. 1 bestselling author of A SLOW FIRE
BURNING*
A slender novel which carries a weighty punch. So beautifully
written, at times it felt like reading a lament on grief, guilt and
responsibility. And it asks the most dangerous question of all: if
you reduce a life down to its bare bones, what are you left with?
Of what will you feel proud? Moving, searing and urgent, this book
is stunning
*Araminta Hall, author of ONE OF THE GOOD GUYS*
Intelligent and nourishing, Stone Yard Devotional shows us the
mysteries of human relationships, asking who can and should bestow
forgiveness. This novel is subtly powerful and utterly
engrossing
*Claire Fuller, author of UNSETTLED GROUND*
Remarkable - I'm still trying to figure out how she pulled it off.
The best thing she's done
*Sydney Morning Herald*
Magnificent and radical . . . It gripped me from the opening line
to the very last
*Age*
A quiet, calm, very personal book at a time when we are all so
overwhelmed with everything happening around us
*Spiegel*
Wood writes not only grippingly but in a lovingly ironic way about
everything the monastery heroine experiences - and it's more than
you'd expect
*Flow*
A quietly extraordinary novel. The narrative is stripped to bedrock
and yet, paradoxically, is as complex and fertile as the compost
that forms one of its primary metaphors
*The Conversation*
Mesmeric
*Sydney Morning Herald*
It's possible that some readers regarded Charlotte Wood's 2016
Stella Prize-winning The Natural Way of Things as the pinnacle of
her writing career, but as it happens Wood was just getting warmed
up . . . Wood's use of first person is reminiscent of Elizabeth
Strout's Lucy novels; even the episodic structure seems to take
inspiration from those books. But there are also echoes of
Marilynne Robinson in that the narrator's self-scrutiny is involved
in the question of what it means to live a moral life . . . In this
extraordinary novel, everything resonates and becomes meaningful .
. . It's difficult to understate the risks Wood has taken in
constructing this book out of apparently minor events. But Stone
Yard Devotional is a stunning work of fiction from a major writer
who keeps getting better
*Australian*
A book that extends and deepens Wood's already remarkable
achievements as a novelist in powerful and often profound ways . .
. It is a mark of Wood's sophistication as a writer that the novel
does not attempt to resolve these contradictions. Instead it
suggest that goodness is fraught and imperfect and that the bonds
of love and obligation, kindness and cruelty that bind us to one
another are written deep in our bodies, shaping us in ways we
cannot ever fully escape or understand
*Saturday Paper*
Wood's generous capacity for sustained attention is a gift to
readers . . . Stone Yard Devotional invites the kind of
contemplation and pause that is rare in a world of constant
distraction. Its slow pace is counterbalanced by the shafts of
meaning that fall right through Wood's lucid prose. Its stillness
comes to feel less like a retreat and more like a radical practice,
the soul-work of holding oneself accountable. If there is peace to
be found here, it is hard won
*Australian Book Review*
PRAISE FOR CHARLOTTE WOOD'S THE WEEKEND
A Sunday Times 'Best books for summer 2021' | A Times, Guardian and
Daily Mail paperback pick | A Times, Observer, Independent, Daily
Express and Good Housekeeping book of the year
'The Weekend is so great I am struggling to find the words to do it
justice'
Marian Keyes
'A lovely, lively, intelligent, funny book'
Tessa Hadley
'A rare pleasure'
Sunday Times
'Glorious... Charlotte Wood joins the ranks of writers such as Nora
Ephron, Penelope Lively and Elizabeth Strout'
Guardian
'These women are so alive on the page, it is impossible not to feel
a kinship and intimacy with each of them'
Daily Express
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