Cloistered

Author Catherine Coldstream
Narrator Catherine Coldstream
Publisher Random House
Publish Date 1 January 1970
Run Time 11 hours and 23 minutes
Format Audio
Genre Autobiography: religious and spiritual, Biography and non-fiction prose, Coping with death and bereavement, Family and health, Memoirs, Religious communities and monasticism, Roman Catholicism, Roman Catholic Church, Society and Social Sciences, Sociology: death and dying.

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Brought to you by Penguin.

An astonishing memoir of twelve years as a contemplative nun in a silent monastery

Cloistered takes the reader deep into the hidden world of a traditional Carmelite monastery as it approaches the third Millennium and tells the story of an intense personal journey into and out of an enclosed life of poverty, chastity and obedience.

Finding an apparently perfect world at Akenside Priory, and a haven after the loss of her father, Catherine Coldstream trusts herself to a group of twenty silent women, believing she is trusting herself to God. As the beauty and mystery of an ancient way of life enfolds her, she surrenders herself wholly to its power, only to find that all is not as it seems behind the Order's closed doors.

Cut off from the wider world for decades, the community has managed to evade accountability to any authority beyond itself. When Sister Catherine realises that a toxic cult of the personality has replaced the ancient ideal of religious obedience, she is faced with a dilemma. Will she submit even to this, or will she be forced to speak out?

An exploration of the limits of trust, Cloistered shows us how far grief can take us along the road of self-surrender, and of how much harm is done when institutional flaws go unacknowledged. Catherine's honest account of her time in the monastery - and her dramatic flight from it - is both a beautiful love song to a lost community and a sharp critique of the abuse of power in an ancient institution.

Disclaimer: This book is a work of non-fiction based on the life, experiences and recollections of the author. In some cases names of people and places, dates, sequences and the detail of events have been changed to protect the privacy of others.

©2024 Catherine Coldstream (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Critics 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

Observer

‘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

‘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

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

The Times

‘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

Both gripping and horrifying… [a] rich memoir

Daily Telegraph

‘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] 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

‘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

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