Stone Yard Devotional

"She’s a fantastic writer. And, again, it’s looking at the nature of forgiveness and the limitations of that. The protagonist, the narrator, retreats to a religious community. The nuns learn that the remains of a missing nun, Sister Jenny have been discovered in Thailand. And that her bones will be returned to the Sisterhood by ‘celebrity nun’, Helen Parry. It kind of revolves, or evolves, around that. Again, there are so many layers to this one. It’s looking at ideas of decay, but also at forgiveness and atonement, and—within the convent—themes of environmentalism, which is symbolised in the plague of mice. It felt like a reflection on the relentlessness of forces of nature, and how they can overwhelm human efforts at control. It challenged that disciplined regime of the convent in a way that makes us think about how we try to control what is uncontrollable. That’s probably quite a convoluted way of explaining it. Yes. I mean, I really enjoyed it, and it made me think about faith and religion, lots of questions that I’ve found myself thinking about in different ways over time. So it resonates on lots of levels. That’s the thing about these books. You find yourself drawn into events and into characters that you don’t expect you’re going to feel empathy with, or wouldn’t come into your thinking naturally. But when you are immersed in that universe, you find yourself questioning a lot about your own life. There’s a lot in these six books on the shortlist that will leave you questioning how you think, how you behave, your own past, your system of priorities, your own morality, how you look forward, how you think about existence and consciousness. So they are all very thought provoking books at a very deep level without in any way being didactic. That’s what I love about them: there is beautiful, graceful writing in all of these books. Part of our best books of 2024 series"