The following version of this book was used to create this guide: Wood, Charlotte. Stone Yard Devotional. Allen & Unwin, 2023.

An unnamed woman drives into the region where she grew up and stops first at the local cemetery, where her parents are buried. She has avoided this place for decades, and the visit unsettles her, bringing back the physical sensations of the funerals and the distance she has put between herself and her past. Afterward, she continues on to a remote abbey where a small community of nuns live by a strict daily schedule of prayer, silence, and work. The abbey’s outward look strikes her as more functional than welcoming, and she arrives with a mixture of embarrassment, anxiety, and determination to disappear for a while.

In the first days of her stay, the narrator learns the routines that structure life at the abbey. She attends the hours in the church, eats simple meals, and begins to understand the personalities and roles within the group. Simone leads with firm authority and protects the abbey’s boundaries, while Bonaventure carries a gentler presence that the narrator finds both compelling and difficult to interpret. Josephine tends to practical tasks and music, and the younger nuns, including Sissy and Carmel, bring their own forms of devotion and energy into the communal life. The narrator stays in a small space of her own and tries to obey the expectations around quiet, but her mind continues to churn. She watches herself judging the nuns’ language and habits even as she is drawn to the steadiness of their days.

As she settles in, memories intrude constantly. She returns in thought to her childhood and to her parents’ lives, particularly to the atmosphere of fear and urgency that surrounded her mother’s illness. She also thinks of friends from her adult life, including Beth, whose worsening cancer forces the narrator to confront her own neediness and panic around death. These recollections rise up during the abbey’s silences and during its repetitive liturgy, and the narrator measures her own restlessness against the nuns’ practice of endurance. She continues to notice the abbey’s physical environment, the old buildings and paddocks, and the presence of Richard Gittens, a local man who helps the community with repairs, supplies, and occasional heavy work. Richard’s wife, Annette, exists at the edges of the abbey’s life, part of the world nearby but separate from the enclosed routine the nuns protect.

By the end of the narrator’s first five days, she has not found a clean sense of transformation, but she has experienced moments of calm and moments of resistance, and she leaves with the sense that the abbey has lodged itself inside her. Sometime later, she returns “for good,” no longer only a visitor passing through but someone who has chosen to live within the abbey’s orbit. Her daily life becomes more entangled with the community’s needs and crises. The region grows hotter and drier, and word arrives from Richard that a mouse plague is moving toward them. The nuns have avoided keeping cats because of local wildlife, but the scale of the coming infestation forces them to consider killing mice in large numbers, a decision that troubles the community even as they accept it as necessary.

At the same time, the abbey prepares for the return of Sister Jenny, a nun who once belonged to the community. Simone and Bonaventure explain Jenny’s history to the narrator: Jenny left years earlier to do difficult work with abused women in Bangkok, and she vanished after confronting an American priest who came to the shelter. For a long time, the details were uncertain and the loss remained unresolved. Now, after flooding in Bangkok dislodges evidence, Jenny’s bones have been recovered and identified, and arrangements are made for her to be brought back to the abbey for burial. The nuns do not want publicity or gossip, and they insist that even among themselves they keep their agitation controlled, treating the return as a solemn duty rather than an event.

The mouse plague arrives with frightening speed. Mice invade the buildings, defy ordinary measures, and make sleep and prayer feel contaminated. The community begins setting traps and laying bait, and Josephine takes on the grim task of clearing sticky mats. The narrator feels fear that surprises her in its intensity, and she also feels shame at the fear. The abbey becomes a place where the boundaries between the spiritual and the bodily are constantly crossed by the scuttling, the smell, and the knowledge that every room can be breached. Richard becomes more present as an adviser and helper, warning them that the plague can become unbearable if they do not act. The nuns and the narrator begin collecting dead mice in buckets and tubs, and the need for disposal grows into a daily ritual.

The arrival of Jenny’s coffin adds another layer of tension. Helen Parry comes to the abbey in connection with the return of the bones, and she stays long enough to disrupt the community’s balance. The narrator, already uneasy, finds Helen’s manner grating and intrusive. Bonaventure, in particular, seems wounded by Helen’s presence, and the narrator watches Bonaventure shrink under Helen’s small demands and judgments. Yet Helen is also connected to Jenny’s story and to unfinished family business, and she admits she has come not only to see Jenny returned to the abbey but also to see her own mother before she dies. Helen begins spending time alone in the room where the coffin is kept, and the narrator notices a change in her afterward, as if the presence of the bones is working on her in ways she does not explain.

As the infestation worsens, Richard digs a large pit in a paddock to serve as a grave for the dead mice, and the narrator watches the violence of the excavator cutting into the ground. Each day, the narrator and Josephine tip wheelbarrow loads of mice into the pit, throw lime over the bodies, and cover them with soil. The work becomes exhausting and surreal, made stranger by the fact that, at the same time, Jenny’s coffin rests in the “good room,” waiting for its own burial. The narrator moves between these forms of death, and the abbey’s prayer continues even as the buildings fill with stench and the sense of siege.

In the weeks that follow, conflict and confession surface. Bonaventure reveals to the narrator that she and Jenny once had a terrible fight before Jenny left the abbey, and that their estrangement, followed by Jenny’s disappearance, has haunted Bonaventure for decades. The narrator begins to understand that the return of the bones reopens old wounds and old questions about the meaning of vows, duty, and escape. Helen continues to needle at the community’s choices, speaking with the confidence of someone who believes she sees more clearly than the nuns do, but she also remains drawn to the coffin, returning to it as if it might yield an answer.

Part III begins in autumn, with Ash Wednesday marking a shift in the season and in the mood of the abbey. The mouse plague shows signs of easing, and the community’s hope returns carefully, as if speaking hope aloud might summon disaster back again. Attention turns fully to the burial of Sister Jenny. The nuns, the narrator, and two other women, including Dolores, work together to move the coffin through the abbey and out to Richard’s vehicle. Richard drives it through the paddocks toward a chosen gravesite in a place called Stone Yard, while the others walk behind in rain jackets and under umbrellas. At the gravesite, the open grave waits beside the excavator, and the scale of the hole shocks the narrator again.

Richard and Helen climb down into the pit, and the group kneels at the edge while they lower the coffin into their arms. For a moment it seems as if the weight might slip, but Richard and Helen steady it and set it down in the earth. Helen climbs back out with the narrator’s help, and the group stands around the grave in the rain, heads bowed. With Jenny finally placed back into the ground of the abbey’s country, the community completes the duty that has gathered them into weeks of strain, and the narrator remains with them in the aftermath, holding the images of bones, soil, plague, and ritual together as the season turns and the immediate crisis passes.