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*** Shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize ***

”Do you have to believe in God to join a religious order? Nobody has ever asked me, specifically, about belief. And anyway, I haven’t ever joined. Not really.��

Our unnamed narrator attends a retreat at the convent near her childhood home in regional NSW. Her marriage has ended, and she is burnt out from her job and the various causes she has followed and worked for passionately. The loss of a friend has also proven to be a turning point, and quiet and solitude is what she craves.

Going back to the area she grew up in and left over twenty years ago brings up all sorts of memories and thoughts. She drives down streets she’d forgotten about. She remembers her school years and the cruelty of human nature to gang up against a school mate who was perceived to be different and for this reason was a “threat�� to the others.

As time passes our narrator doesn’t return to her old life in the inner city, to the hustle and bustle. While not joining the convent in a religious sense, she has easily moved her life to one of silence, hard work and routine. She appreciates the value of doing the same things each day. The morning and evening prayers. The ascetic lifestyle.

There's a very telling moment where she unsubscribes online from the many eco activist organisations that she'd been following. Further disengaging herself from her old life, one click at a time.

A blast from the past arrives at the convent in the form of a classmate who'd been targeted and bullied for years, including by our narrator. The girl who was different is now a nun working in poor communities. Slowly our narrator learns of how difficult her childhood was, and how cruel the incessant ostracising. Which proves how little we truly know of what’s going on in someone else’s life.

The mouse plague - which was a massive problem in country NSW for several years due to drought - is a constant throughout this book. It could symbolize all sorts of things, and it’s fitting that this was incorporated into this story. Obstacles, frustrations, nature. The cycle of life. How man fights nature and nature fights back.

This is a deeply contemplative book. Which, depending on what stage of life you’re at, you may already have pondered the same things our narrator has. About past hurts made to you and from you. About grief that we carry around which never really leaves us. About viewing your parents through a different lens as you yourself age. About guilt and forgiveness. And an understanding that perhaps there isn’t a point to any of it and there are no answers.

Without having read all of the Booker Prize shortlist books this year, I am quietly confident that this has a good chance of being the last book standing. Charlotte Wood has the uncanny ability - as she did with her fabulous book The Weekend - to write about women of a certain age with compassion while openly showing their foibles without apology.

In a world full of noise, something forces you to slow down to read this book in pace with the life of the narrator. Good luck Charlotte, I hope you win! Either way, another well thought out and emotive book.