Stone Yard Devotional begins with an unnamed woman pulling up in the carpark of a monastery in her childhood town, after visiting her parents’ graves “for the first time in thirty-five years”.
It is a quiet beginning, spare in its description and detail, but full of foreboding and feeling. There is so much that is unspoken in Charlotte Wood’s seventh novel, so much glimpsed and guessed at but never fully seen – an undercurrent of emotion that is all the more powerful for remaining half-hidden.
