Stone Yard Devotional

Wood structures the novel around three intrusions into a rural convent where an unnamed former conservationist has retreated: a mouse plague that overruns the buildings, driven south by drought, the return of a murdered nun's bones from Thailand, and the arrival of the activist who escorted them, a woman the narrator once helped bully at school. Almost nothing happens by way of conventional plot; the force is in the narrator's unsparing self-accounting, particularly her inability to resolve old cruelty into either guilt or absolution. The mouse infestation could easily read as heavy-handed metaphor, but Wood keeps it visceral and physical rather than symbolic. It's a spare, interior novel that earns its quiet through precision, not incident.