By Sam Sacks

"Do you have to believe in God to join a religious order?" asks the narrator of Charlotte Wood's "Stone Yard Devotional." The question would seem to be rhetorical, since the unnamed, middle-aged narrator has done precisely that. Unhappy and desperate to retreat from her life in Sydney, Australia, she has been permitted to remain indefinitely at a rural abbey, where she takes part in all except the religious duties of its nuns, tending especially to its guesthouses and meals.

But the narrator is also in earnest when she wonders about her place in the abbey. What does it mean to disappear behind the veil if you're going to keep wearing civilian clothing? "Stone Yard Devotional" can be viewed as part of a quiet trend of books -- along with Neel Mukherjee's "Choice" and Caoilinn Hughes's "The Alternatives" -- about disaffected characters searching for an escape from broken secular societies. Ms. Wood's pastoral novel is contemplative, curious, rewardingly conflicted and frequently beautiful.

It's also surprisingly busy. The first interruption is caused by the arrival of Sister Helen Parry, a bullied and abused childhood classmate of the narrator who grew up to become a "celebrity nun," renowned for her aggressive human-rights activism. Sister Helen is returning with the remains of a sister who left the abbey and was murdered while working at a women's shelter in Thailand. Her burial, however symbolic and significant, overturns the abbey's painstaking seclusion with its chastening reminder of "all the world's catastrophes, all the justice work undone" beyond its boundaries.

The disturbance is deepened by a strangely biblical portent. The novel takes place during the 2020-21 Covid-19 lockdowns, when an aptly named "mouse plague" afflicted regions of eastern Australia. The abbey is quickly overrun by the creatures: They eat through the garden, the electrical cables, even the raw wax used for candle-making. The narrator finds her days consumed by the decidedly non-meditative, often gruesomely ridiculous work of emptying traps and digging pits to dispose of the thousands of rodent carcasses.

Amid these burials -- one sacred, the others profane -- we follow the meandering path of the narrator's reflections, sometimes turning back to her childhood, sometimes fastening upon the lives of the sisters. Ms. Wood writes these passages with exceptional empathy. Most contemporary fiction plays out inside the echo chamber of a protagonist's psyche; its stories are devoted to confronting and working through a private trauma. But while "Stone Yard Devotional" is suffused with sorrow, it exhibits very little grievance. The narrator's observations are sensitive and impersonal, and they yield profound insights into the commonality of suffering.

At one point she cites a line of Simone Weil's that reads, "Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer." This novel's resolute attention to the troubles of others makes it feel, if not strictly religious, then undoubtedly spiritual.

At the center of Evie Wyld's "The Echoes" is a family of goat farmers in the Australian outback: two sisters, Hannah and Rachel; their milquetoast father and daydreaming mother; and, in a camper nearby, their roughneck uncle and his girlfriend. Though the clan tries to behave conventionally, something always seems off-kilter -- from the inedible cakes the mother insists on baking, to the uncle's bar fights, to the dinners disrupted when baby goats jump on the table to graze from the plates. In time, a dark family history underwriting the chaos comes to the surface and Ms. Wyld depicts its repercussions on the lives of the sisters.

It's a story with bite, charisma and a wonderful feeling for place. But Ms. Wyld is not a writer content to deliver her novels straight. "All the Birds, Singing," from 2013, is a psychological thriller told in reverse chronological order. The conceit in "The Echoes" is that the narrator is Hannah's dead boyfriend, Max, who haunts their apartment in London, where Hannah moved after fleeing Australia. Having been killed in a traffic accident, Max hovers around struggling to understand Hannah's demons and the secrets she kept from him about her past.

The novel is thus split between an intense family tragedy and a series of morose monologues from the afterlife. And though the ghostly ruminations lend the book an elegiac quality, their intrusions siphon off a lot of the native energy of the story in Australia. In the end it's not clear exactly what Max's perspective is meant to add, and I began to think of this poor character with resentment -- as a gimmick whose trick is to turn a great book into a merely good one.

New York City's Central Park is the sanctuary for Jane, a painter, and Abe, a novelist, in Jessica Soffer's "This Is a Love Story." It's there that the two meet and have their first dates. When they marry and move to a nearby brownstone it remains their haven. And it's the park that they think back on most when the novel begins and, as Jane succumbs to terminal cancer, the now-elderly couple takes solace in their memories. "For those who know, for those who feel it, the Park is more than just a park. It is evocative, a symbol," writes Ms. Soffer, who has harnessed its romance for her breathless but undeniably effective love story.

Jane and Abe's life is not all kisses beside Bethesda Fountain, however, and spikier events intrude on their reminiscences, from Abe's near-infidelity to Jane's postpartum depression following the birth of their son. Ms. Soffer opens the novel to different perspectives to explore these crises, but, touchingly, she always returns to the couple's resilient connection. Thinking of the craft of storytelling, Abe worries that too much happiness "writes white" on the page. In this book, though, it's the joyful moments that stand out.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

February 14, 2025 11:17 ET (16:17 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.