‘Stone Yard Devotional’ author Charlotte Wood shares her reading picks – Orange County Register

Charlotte Wood is the author most recently of “Stone Yard Devotional,” which was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize, and other 10 books. Here she takes the Book Pages Q&A.

Q. Please tell readers about “Stone Yard Devotional.”

A woman “unsubscribes” from her life in the city – her work as an environmental advocate, her marriage and her home – and takes refuge in a cloistered community hidden away on the stark plains of rural Australia. She doesn’t believe in God but nevertheless finds an uneasy home here, until the peace of the abbey is disturbed by three visitations: a mouse infestation, the returned skeletal remains of a murdered nun, and a troubling visitor from the narrator’s past. It’s a book about the moral challenge of despair, about forgiveness and atonement.

Q. Have you ever spent time in a community such as the one in the book (or one with a similar rodent issue)?

I have stayed in the guesthouses of a couple of monasteries very briefly over the decades, but not spent any length of time there. But I did visit my dear friend on her farm in midst of Australia’s mouse plague in 2021 – two days was quite enough ‘research’ time for me!

 Q. Is there a book or books you always recommend to other readers?

“Crossing to Safety” by Wallace Stegner.

 Q. What are you reading now?

“The Silent Woman,” Janet Malcolm’s exploration of the mythmaking and personality cult surrounding poet Sylvia Plath, as played out by her various biographers.

Q. What’s something – a fact, a bit of dialogue or something else – that has stayed with you from a recent reading?

I laughed out loud at this thought from David Nicholls’ “You Are Here,” a self-assessment by one of his main characters, Marnie: “She wasn’t shy. If anything, she tried too hard, a people-pleaser, though no one ever seemed that pleased.”

Q. Do you listen to audiobooks? If so, are there any titles or narrators you’d recommend?

Not often, but occasionally I listen to an audiobook version of something I’ve already read and loved in its original form – it’s like seeing another light falling on the pages. Lately, I’ve loved Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs Dalloway” and “A Room Of One’s Own,” both read by the supreme Juliet Stevenson. And I’ve been lucky enough to have my own audiobooks read by Australia’s Ailsa Piper, an award-winning and absolutely brilliant audiobook narrator.

Q. Is there a person who made an impact on your reading life – a teacher, a parent, a librarian or someone else?

I had two English teachers for my whole six years of secondary schooling – Paul Cullen and Gilly Litchfield. They saw that I was a writer decades before I did. I owe them everything.

 Q. If you could ask your readers something, what would it be?

If you live in the U.S., please, protest! Make America sane again!