Cloistered

'This incredibly beautiful and moving book is for all of us'

Carmen Bugan, author of Burying the Typewriter

A mesmerising memoir of great clarity and nuance, Cloistered is an account of religious life that is as authentically vulnerable as it is poignantly honest. It will transform the perceptions of its readers regarding the unique traditions of convent life, including its struggle and pain as well as its beauty and glory.

Reverend Dr Ayla Lepine, Associate Rector, St James’s Church Piccadilly, London

'This is a memoir of emotions felt viscerally. But there are also remarkable spiritual insights, intellectual reflections on life and death and, of course, plenty about the intense relationships that developed between Catherine, and the other sisters. Engrossing and moving'

Belinda Jack, author of The Woman Reader

'A profoundly moving memoir which gripped me in a way I simply did not expect. It’s about spirituality and asceticism and silence and sisterhood, but also about how flawed human beings can abuse power and how hermetically sealed communities, which should care for and protect to their members, can be dangerously vulnerable to threats from inside their walls'

Mark Haddon, author of The Porpoise

'Fascinating ... takes its place in a rich tradition of writing about convent life by ex-nuns, and is distinguished by its passionate, lyrical writing, which perfectly expresses the author's ardent search for meaning, freedom and love’

Michèle Roberts, author of Daughters of the House

'In an era of relentless superficiality, Catherine Coldstream's memoir of her years living as a nun draws us back into the cloistered world of the inner life. It shows us what it is we may have abandoned in our lives of emotional and material dependency: a commitment to hope and faith; the transforming structures of a spiritual imagination. Here are beautifully crafted lessons in spiritual survival; the meditative practice of deep loneliness; of days wrapped in prayer and contemplation'

Sally Bayley, author of No Boys Play Here

'Few books achieve what this does in giving a really physical sense of the monastic environment - its sounds and smells, the round of seasons, the sensations in the fingers as they work in kitchen or garden. Catherine Coldstream leaves us recognizing both the beauty and depth of this experience and the churning risks of a life where accountability and spiritual authority are constantly in tension'

Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury

'Cloistered blew me away. It is a glorious, brave and extraordinary story, exquisitely and empathically told. Such a strange mirror reflected back from St Teresa’s clear injunction to know ourselves. Through Catherine's suffering and her tenacity, she has brought something bright, original and achingly truthful into the sunlight'

Katharine Norbury, author of The Fish Ladder

'Fascinating . . . artfully balances high drama with contemplation . . . [Catherine Coldstream's] story describes a young person plunged into the rocky politics of an institution whose ideals are continually eroded by personal hierarchies and confused dogma . . . but consolation [is] to be found in the wonders of music and the natural environment'

Julia Hollander, author of Why We Sing

'Peace and community are fragile things in the hands of humans and wherever there is power there is the opportunity for its abuse. Told with grace and intelligence, Cloistered is an exploration that everyone can resonate with—of the deep desire for peace and community, for a way of life that is ancient and authentic—whilst giving us an honest and moving portrayal of the fallibility that exists in all of us. Immersive, authentic and full of insight'

Jan Fortune, author of Saoirse’s Crossing

'Catherine Coldstream’s story-telling is unfailingly compelling; she evokes transcendent beauty and explores dark corners of the human heart with equal ease, and she can skewer a character in a single deft sentence. Though almost her whole journey is travelled in the seclusion of a contemplative priory, the book is full of drama – sometimes downright terrifying, but ultimately uplifting'

Edward Stourton, author of Confessions

'Catherine Coldstream’s profound and moving Cloistered offers a compelling glimpse of life in a closed religious community. It is at once an intimate spiritual journey and the most scorching account of convent politics since Muriel Spark’s The Abbess of Crewe'

Michael Arditti, author of The Choice

‘I admired [CLOISTERED] enormously for its lucid evocative prose, but most of all for the sincerity and candour with which Coldstream writes about her faith, as a transformative and intimate relation with God’

Sarah Perry, author of The Essex Serpent

‘An immersive, beautifully observed study of the monastic mind, and the forces that can disrupt and unsettle it. Reading it, I felt the gravitational pull of silence and ecstatic connection’

Katherine May, author of Wintering

She writes stunningly of the natural world . . . The absorbing . . . narrative progresses rather like a thriller . . . Beautifully written

Financial Times

[A] beautifully written memoir…one reads with fascination, empathy and mounting alarm… it evolves into a spiritual thriller in which the experience of being a nun unravels into a nightmare as the monastery’s internal politics sour

Observer

Coldstream is unsparing…but gives equal weight to the beauty and purpose she found there

The Times

Both gripping and horrifying… [a] rich memoir

Daily Telegraph

[A] beautifully written… account of the trauma that broke her [Coldstream’s] trust in an ecosystem that she sought out with so much passion and desire

Church Times

[An] engrossing, beautifully written memoir… I strongly recommend this book, both as a riveting human drama and as a fascinating glimpse into what goes on behind closed doors in a community of holy women

Mail on Sunday

[Coldstream’s] prose is always measured and considered, as is Coldstream’s contemplation of the monastic life

New Statesman

Gripping

Prospect

Cloistered is an extraordinary book. Its story unfolds amidst great expanses of silence and reflection yet is full of human drama; it describes long periods in which nothing appears to happen in a narrative that is as compulsively readable and gripping as any thriller. In brilliant and evocative prose Coldstream takes her readers into the world of the monastery, illuminating the feel of chapel, corridors, cell and parlour alongside the material substance of these hidden and mysterious places. Cloistered reveals the dangers inherent in closed communities but is never vengeful. Instead this is a book about the experience of living with faith that is curious and entirely unsanctimonious, written with both humour and generosity of spirit.

Daisy Hay, author of Dinner with Joseph Johnson

A moving study of faith and personal discovery

Financial times, *Summer Reads of 2024*

‘What a wonderful, utterly illuminating work this is – it's been a long time since I've read a book that has given me so much to think about, and resonated so deeply'

Artemis Cooper

An extraordinary and evocative memoir

Dumfries & Galloway Life