Cloistered: My Years as a Nun by Catherine Coldstream (Chatto & Windus, £20) Catherine Coldstream’s choice to become a nun (and in a cloistered, mostly silent community at that) appears a most unlikely one as she came from an artistic, academic, non-Catholic background. But a traumatic home life, the death of her beloved father and break-up of her family caused her to seek the consolation of the monastic life. And she loved it for a time: the isolation, peace, silence, contemplation and closeness to nature.
But it soured due to cliques, a schism and a power struggle in which she found herself turned upon and even violently attacked. Eventually she took flight — from the monastery, she’s keen to point out, but not from her religious faith. A beautifully written, achingly honest devotional memoir that will live long in the memory.
Old Istanbul & Other Essays by Gerard McCarthy (Irish Pages Press, €28) This is travelogue with a difference, full of philosophical musings and insights of a thoughtful author on a quest for answers to profound questions. For example, in Istanbul, “the world is wider than any subjective interpretation of it” with “each perspective part of the human story”; in Jerusalem, he refers to “the human drama that has drawn the children of Abraham together in conflict across the generations”; in Cordoba: “In an ideal world, cultural boundaries should be permeable membranes through which the human spirit would flow.” In Granada, he asks .
