Peter Carey, a two-time winner of the Booker Prize, always refers to literary prizes as a “crapshoot”. Sadly for Charlotte Wood, who was hoping to become the first Australian woman author to win the coveted and influential prize for fiction written in English, the roll of the dice in this year’s Booker fell in favour of English novelist Samantha Harvey.

Harvey’s slim novel Orbital, which is set on the International Space Station and brings us the voices of six astronauts as they circle Earth 16 times and contemplate its beauty and the precarcity of human life on it, pipped the overwhelming favourite, Percival Everett’s James, a reimagination of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of Huck’s runaway slave companion, Jim.

Wood was shortlisted for her acclaimed novel Stone Yard Devotional, the story of a grieving woman who turns her back on the trappings of city life and marriage to live in anticipated tranquility with a group of nuns on the Monaro plain. But there she endures a mouse plague, the disturbing return of the bones of a nun who had been killed overseas, and the re-emergence of a troubling figure from her past.

Wood told the Booker organisers that she wanted nothing trivial or insincere in her book. “I wanted to try to master what Saul Bellow called ‘stillness in the midst of chaos’, risking a tonal restraint and depth that I hope, at the same time, shimmers with energy.”

As Helen Elliott wrote in her review for this masthead: “In the contemporary world this kind of stillness feels radical. Illicit. And here is the heartbeat of this magnificent, radical novel. A woman, unnamed, active, dedicated to saving the world through the right causes, is considering leaving it … Stone Yard Devotional is daring because it looks at the obscure and therefore the difficult in the contemporary world. Difficult and obscure, but also something that commonly underpins everything we do. In a plainer world, this was called the search for meaning when the concept called God is largely absent – now probably more absent than it has ever been.”

Wood’s work includes novels The Submerged Cathedral, Animal People, The Weekend, The Natural Way of Things and The Children. She is also a perceptive writer about writing. In her series of interviews in The Writer’s Room she talks to authors including Amanda Lohrey, Lloyd Jones and Christos Tsiolkas about their art and craft, and she has written beautifully and wittily about food and cooking in Love & Hunger.

Stone Yard Devotional is personal, informed by Wood’s diagnosis with breast cancer and her lingering feelings about the death of her mother years earlier. At one point the narrator reflects on her mother, writing “I never knew anyone else who had her reverence for the earth itself”.

It’s a line that chimes with Harvey’s remarks on receiving the award. She said looking at the Earth from space was “a bit like a child looking into a mirror and realising for the first time that the person in the mirror is herself. What we do to the Earth we do to ourselves and what we do to life on Earth – human and other – we do to ourselves.”