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This has the feel of fragmentary autofiction, as if Sigrid Nunez decided to rewrite Iris Murdoch’s The Bell and set it in contemporary Australia. The unnamed narrator has given up on her marriage and on wildlife conservation, once her profession. Despite not being particularly religious, this resigned ex-environmentalist ends up living in a remote convent when what started as a five-day retreat turned permanent. Something about the isolation and the community’s regimented, ritualistic activity is comforting to her, and she’s documenting it all in a diary. It’s a time of plague: not just Covid, but also a mouse infestation worse than you’ve ever encountered (if you have musophobia, you will NOT want to read this). The other two complications in an otherwise low-key plot are the return of the remains of a murdered nun, and a visit from someone the narrator remembers from high school, an uncomfortable reminder that she participated in bullying instead of having compassion on someone less privileged.

It’s hard to believe that this is by the same author as The Weekend, which despite its focus on older age was so witty. By contrast, Stone Yard Devotional offers no such consolations. Especially with the narrator's ongoing guilt and grief over her parents, even though they have been gone for 30 years, death is presented as inexorable. And while temporary conflicts do resolve themselves towards the close, an overall sense of despair lingers. And yet the diary feels so true to life, from the randomness of the incidents she relates from her girlhood to the raw honesty of her musings on loss and religion, that I was rapt. It leaves you uneasy; it leaves a mark.

Some favourite lines:

“Being here feels somehow like childhood; the hours are so long and there is so much waiting, staring into space. Absolutely nothing is asked of me, nothing expected.�

“Nobody will read this but me. Even so, I imagine there are things I’m leaving out.�

“When I think about the phases of my life, it is as a series of rooms behind me, each with a door to a previous room left open, behind which is another room, and another and another. The rooms are not quite empty, not exactly dark, but they are shadowy, with indistinct shapes, and I don’t like to think about them much.�

“I have sometimes thought it wrong of me to be so preoccupied with my mother and not my father.�

“Once more I wish I was able to be a wiser daughter to her when she was still alive.�