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This is a quiet, contemplative novel about an unnamed woman who, following her divorce, the death of her mother, and quitting her job with an endangered species organization - and also at the beginning of the Covid shutdown - decides to join a community of sequestered nuns in a remote area of her native Australia. Not exactly what one would expect to contain riveting, fast-paced thrills - and it doesn't.

But nevertheless, I was quite taken with Wood's narrator and story - and if I could have done with a few less descriptions of the encroaching mouse plague (a real occurrence every few years in those parts), and perhaps a bit more differentiation in the subsidiary nun characters, I was no less taken with what there is here. Wood's prose is also serviceable, without being overly ornate or fussy.

And the final sections about forgiveness and - having lost my own mother recently - the details of her mother's final days, really hit home with me. There's been a bit of a push back about its inclusion on the Booker longlist - primarily, I suspect, because people assume it took the place of the wrongfully neglected Praiseworthy - but it certainly deserves its spot more than a few others on the list (cough, cough ... Headshot ... cough ... Orbital ... cough). In fact, I thought it was much better at delineating its profundities than the rather trite and obvious 'wonders' of the later book.