Cloistered: My Years as a Nun

In an evocative memoir, Catherine Coldstream describes life as a contemplative nun in the 1990s, and the dramatic events which led to her flight from the monastery on the brink of the Millennium. After the shock of her father's death, and with her family scattered, twenty-four-year old Catherine was left grieving and alone. A search for meaning led her to Roman Catholicism and the nuns of Akenside Priory. Cloistered takes us beyond the grille of an enclosed monastic world with its tight-knit community of dedicated women. We see Catherine, praying in the spareness of her simple cell, tilling the land or singing at Lauds, a novice who has found peace in an ancient way of life. But as she surrenders to her final vows, all is not as it seems behind the Priory's closed doors. Power struggles erupt, and the hothouse atmosphere turns to conflict - with far-reaching consequences for those within. Catherine comes to realise that divine authority is mediated through flawed and all-too-human channels. She is faced with a dilemma- should she protect the serenity she has found, or speak out? A love song to a lost community and an honest account of her twelve years in the Order, Cloistered is also a cautionary tale about what can happen when good people cut themselves off from the wider world.

About the Author :
Catherine Coldstream was born in London, and grew up loving music, words, and books. After converting to Roman Catholicism in her twenties, she spent twelve years in a Carmelite monastery where she lived the life of a silent contemplative nun. Since leaving her community she has studied at the Universities of Oxford, East Anglia, and London, and taught theology, philosophy, and ethics in schools. The effects of her years as a nun have never left her and continue to inspire and inform her writing.

Review :
[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 ‘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’ She writes stunningly of the natural world . . . The absorbing . . . narrative progresses rather like a thriller . . . Beautifully written ‘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’ Coldstream is unsparing…but gives equal weight to the beauty and purpose she found there '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' Both gripping and horrifying… [a] rich memoir ‘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' [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 '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'