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Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2024

I'm glad I went back to the audiobook and put aside my apprehension that this would be a s0-called "spiritual" novel. The Booker Prize longlisting of this short novel convinced me I should give it another chance.

A middle-aged, childless woman leaves her job, interests, city life, her dying marriage, and moves close to where she grew up, in a small town. She somehow manages to move into a small Catholic monastery, inhabited by nuns. Interestingly enough, the narrator is not religious.

The life is simple, preoccupied with survival, domesticity, and rituals. There's a horrendous mouse plague that lasts years (based on real-life events). Also, there is a famous nun coming to live at the monastery.

Wood weaved seamlessly between the daily grind and the past, with little snippets of moments and events, showing how memory is so strange, certain seemingly small things we remember for decades. The back-and-forth examines life, sorrow, guilt, grief.

The marriage and the relationships with men are brushed over, they're not analysed in great detail, which I guess is fair enough, I appreciate the author's choice of not centrering men in the character's life.

This is a quiet, navel-gazing kind of novel that will appeal to some more than others. My appreciation of this novel was greatly enhaced by Ailsa Piper's beautiful narration.