At this abby you don't have to be a believer

Why has Charlotte Wood's novel Stone Yard Devotional affected me and hundreds of other readers so powerfully? I don't identify with the narrator, a middle-aged woman who joins a small and struggling abby in what sounds like Australia's outback. She claims to be an atheist and does not believe in the efficacy of prayer and the book contains no deep, serious discussions of religious faith or lack of. 

The narrator participates in the abby's routines and she works as hard as any of the sisters who, for the most part, accept her presence. It sounds as if the world has been too much with her and she wants a break, and don't we all?

The narrator grew up in the small town not far from the abby so in a sense she has come home. At the beginning of the book she has a husband but he is elsewhere and he plays no role in the narrator's abby life. She apparently has no children and her parents are dead. She worked for a non-profit in Sydney, but does not miss the job. She has no wish to become nun but she settles into the abby's routine.

Three events (matters? occasions?) disturb the routine. A terrible plague of mice infest the abby. The mice eat the insulation off wiring, nest in the organ, turn cannibalistic if there is nothing to eat but other mice.  

Second, the bones of a dead—and presumed murdered—sister are returned to the abby where they sit in their casket alone in a room while the abbess struggles with the Australian bureaucracy to obtain permission to bury the nun on the abby's land.

Finally, the nun who accompanies the bones back from Thailand is a strong, outspoken, dynamic woman, someone the narrator had known and had known was tormented by other girls during their school days together. The narrator would be happy to watch the nun deliver the bones and leave but the pandemic has trapped her in the abby.

I repeat, why has Stone Yard Devotional affected me so powerfully? I don't know. The writing is clean. The narrator's thoughts and activities are plausible. We have a strong sense of the abby life and the narrator's character. The best I can say is that I found the novel to be like a warm bath, cleansing and renewing and comforting.