Genre Fiction
![Katy Hays - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_a_katy_hays.jpg)
The Cloisters: A Novel
"Captivating in every sense of the word." -Sarah Pearse, New York Times bestselling author
"Grabbed me in a way that no book has done since The Secret History." -Rachel Kapelke-Dale, author of The Ballerinas
In this "sinister, jaw-dropping" (Sarah Penner, author of The Lost Apothecary) debut novel, a circle of researchers uncover a mysterious deck of tarot cards and shocking secrets in New York's famed Met Cloisters.
When Ann Stilwell arrives in New York City, she expects to spend her summer working as a curatorial associate at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Instead, she finds herself assigned to The Cloisters, a gothic museum and garden renowned for its medieval art collection and its group of enigmatic researchers studying the history of divination.
Desperate to escape her painful past, Ann is happy to indulge the researchers' more outlandish theories about the history of fortune telling. But what begins as academic curiosity quickly turns into obsession when Ann discovers a hidden 15th-century deck of tarot cards that might hold the key to predicting the future. When the dangerous game of power, seduction, and ambition at The Cloisters turns deadly, Ann becomes locked in a race for answers as the line between the arcane and the modern blurs.
A haunting and magical blend of genres, The Cloisters is a gripping debut that will keep you on the edge of your seat.
"Grabbed me in a way that no book has done since The Secret History." -Rachel Kapelke-Dale, author of The Ballerinas
In this "sinister, jaw-dropping" (Sarah Penner, author of The Lost Apothecary) debut novel, a circle of researchers uncover a mysterious deck of tarot cards and shocking secrets in New York's famed Met Cloisters.
When Ann Stilwell arrives in New York City, she expects to spend her summer working as a curatorial associate at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Instead, she finds herself assigned to The Cloisters, a gothic museum and garden renowned for its medieval art collection and its group of enigmatic researchers studying the history of divination.
Desperate to escape her painful past, Ann is happy to indulge the researchers' more outlandish theories about the history of fortune telling. But what begins as academic curiosity quickly turns into obsession when Ann discovers a hidden 15th-century deck of tarot cards that might hold the key to predicting the future. When the dangerous game of power, seduction, and ambition at The Cloisters turns deadly, Ann becomes locked in a race for answers as the line between the arcane and the modern blurs.
A haunting and magical blend of genres, The Cloisters is a gripping debut that will keep you on the edge of your seat.
Editorial Reviews
"A story of academic obsession, Renaissance magic and the ruthless pursuit of power. Captivating in every sense of the word." -Sarah Pearse, New York Times bestselling author of The Sanatorium
"The tension and foreboding builds gradually in this outstanding gothic debut, allowing readers to savor Ann's voice. The disturbing account plays with class differences and women friendship, set against a medieval, academic atmosphere sheltered from the city." -Library Journal, starred review
"Sultry and sinister . . . Hays's debut teems with sexual tension, the secrets of divination, and scholarly obsessiveness. With a jaw-dropping twist at the end, The Cloisters serves as a warning to us all: we may think we know what life has in store, but fate and fortune tend to turn their own tricks." -Sarah Penner, New York Times bestselling author of The Lost Apothecary
"A moody and suspenseful story . . . Readers will be fascinated by the evocative setting as well as the behind-the-scenes glimpses into museum curatorship and the cutthroat games of academia . . . An accomplished debut." -Publishers Weekly
"A tour de force by an important new voice, The Cloisters begins as a fish-out-of-water story. But as Katy Hays deftly weaves in layer after layer of the occult, art, and academia, it turns into a rich tapestry that speaks to issues of privilege, power, and ambition-and, more than anything, the darkness lurking just inside ivory towers. Virtuosic and incredibly compelling, The Cloisters grabbed me in a way that no book has done since The Secret History." -Rachel Kapelke-Dale, author of The Ballerinas
"A tantalizingly clever tale, laced with surprises as devious as its cast of shadowy scholars, The Cloisters had me gripped from cover to cover. Hays's debut is diabolical and darkly entertaining, a masterwork of literary suspense that surges to an otherworldly conclusion."<...
"The tension and foreboding builds gradually in this outstanding gothic debut, allowing readers to savor Ann's voice. The disturbing account plays with class differences and women friendship, set against a medieval, academic atmosphere sheltered from the city." -Library Journal, starred review
"Sultry and sinister . . . Hays's debut teems with sexual tension, the secrets of divination, and scholarly obsessiveness. With a jaw-dropping twist at the end, The Cloisters serves as a warning to us all: we may think we know what life has in store, but fate and fortune tend to turn their own tricks." -Sarah Penner, New York Times bestselling author of The Lost Apothecary
"A moody and suspenseful story . . . Readers will be fascinated by the evocative setting as well as the behind-the-scenes glimpses into museum curatorship and the cutthroat games of academia . . . An accomplished debut." -Publishers Weekly
"A tour de force by an important new voice, The Cloisters begins as a fish-out-of-water story. But as Katy Hays deftly weaves in layer after layer of the occult, art, and academia, it turns into a rich tapestry that speaks to issues of privilege, power, and ambition-and, more than anything, the darkness lurking just inside ivory towers. Virtuosic and incredibly compelling, The Cloisters grabbed me in a way that no book has done since The Secret History." -Rachel Kapelke-Dale, author of The Ballerinas
"A tantalizingly clever tale, laced with surprises as devious as its cast of shadowy scholars, The Cloisters had me gripped from cover to cover. Hays's debut is diabolical and darkly entertaining, a masterwork of literary suspense that surges to an otherworldly conclusion."<...
Short Excerpt Teaser
Chapter One CHAPTER ONE
I would arrive in New York at the beginning of June. At a time when the heat was building-gathering in the asphalt, reflecting off the glass-until it reached a peak that wouldn't release long into September. I was going east, unlike so many of the students from my class at Whitman College who were headed west, toward Seattle and San Francisco, sometimes Hong Kong.
The truth was, I wasn't going east to the place I had originally hoped, which was Cambridge or New Haven, or even Williamstown. But when the emails came from department chairs saying they were very sorry… a competitive applicant pool… best of luck in your future endeavors, I was grateful that one application had yielded a positive result: the Summer Associates Program at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A favor, I knew, to my emeritus advisor, Richard Lingraf, who had once been something of an Ivy League luminary before the East Coast weather-or was it a questionable happening at his alma mater?-had chased him west.
They called it an "associates" program, but it was an internship with a meager stipend. It didn't matter to me; I would have worked two jobs and paid them to be there. It was, after all, the Met. The kind of prestigious imprimatur someone like me-a hick from an unknown school-needed.
Well, Whitman wasn't entirely unknown. But because I had grown up in Walla Walla, the dusty, single-story town in southeastern Washington where Whitman was located, I rarely encountered anyone from out of the state who knew of its existence. My whole childhood had been the college, an experience that had slowly dulled much of its magic. Where other students arrived on campus excited to start their adult lives anew, I was afforded no such clean slate. This was because both of my parents worked for Whitman. My mother, in dining services, where she planned menus and theme nights for the first-year students who lived in the residence halls: Basque, Ethiopian, asado. If I had lived on campus, she might have planned my meals too, but the financial waiver Whitman granted employees only extended to tuition, and so, I lived at home.
My father, however, had been a linguist-although not one on faculty. An autodidact who borrowed books from Whitman's Penrose Library, he taught me the difference between the six Latin cases and how to parse rural Italian dialects, all in between his facilities shifts at the college. That is, before he was buried next to my grandparents the summer before my senior year, behind the Lutheran church at the edge of town, the victim of a hit-and-run. He never told me where his love of languages had come from, just that he was grateful I shared it.
"Your dad would be so proud, Ann," Paula said.
It was the end of my shift at the restaurant where I worked, and where Paula, the hostess, had hired me almost a decade earlier, at the age of fifteen. The space was deep and narrow, with a tarnished tin ceiling, and we had left the front door open, hoping the fresh air would thin out the remaining dinner smells. Every now and then a car would crawl down the wide street outside, its headlights cutting the darkness.
"Thanks, Paula." I counted out my tips on the counter, trying my best to ignore the arcing red welts that were blooming on my forearm. The dinner rush-busier than usual due to Whitman's graduation-had forced me to stack plates, hot from the salamander, directly onto my arm. The walk from the kitchen to the dining room was just long enough that the ceramic burned with every trip.
"You know, you can always come back," said John, the bartender, who released the tap handle and passed me a shifter. We were only allowed one beer per shift, but the rule was rarely followed.
I pressed out my last dollar bill and folded the money into my back pocket. "I know."
But I didn't want to come back. My father, so inexplicably and suddenly gone, haunted every block of sidewalk that framed downtown, even the browning patch of grass in front of the restaurant. The escapes I had relied on-books and research-no longer took me far enough away.
"Even if it's fall and we don't need the staff," John continued, "we'll still hire you."
I tried to tamp down the panic I felt at the prospect of being back in Walla Walla come fall, when I heard Paula say behind me, "We're closed."
I looked over my shoulder to the front door, where a gaggle of girls had gathered, some reading the menu in the vestibule, others having pushed through the screen door, causing the CLOSED sign to slap against the wood.
"But you're still serving," said one, pointing at my beer.
"Sorry. Closed," said John.
"Oh, come on," said another. Their ...
I would arrive in New York at the beginning of June. At a time when the heat was building-gathering in the asphalt, reflecting off the glass-until it reached a peak that wouldn't release long into September. I was going east, unlike so many of the students from my class at Whitman College who were headed west, toward Seattle and San Francisco, sometimes Hong Kong.
The truth was, I wasn't going east to the place I had originally hoped, which was Cambridge or New Haven, or even Williamstown. But when the emails came from department chairs saying they were very sorry… a competitive applicant pool… best of luck in your future endeavors, I was grateful that one application had yielded a positive result: the Summer Associates Program at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A favor, I knew, to my emeritus advisor, Richard Lingraf, who had once been something of an Ivy League luminary before the East Coast weather-or was it a questionable happening at his alma mater?-had chased him west.
They called it an "associates" program, but it was an internship with a meager stipend. It didn't matter to me; I would have worked two jobs and paid them to be there. It was, after all, the Met. The kind of prestigious imprimatur someone like me-a hick from an unknown school-needed.
Well, Whitman wasn't entirely unknown. But because I had grown up in Walla Walla, the dusty, single-story town in southeastern Washington where Whitman was located, I rarely encountered anyone from out of the state who knew of its existence. My whole childhood had been the college, an experience that had slowly dulled much of its magic. Where other students arrived on campus excited to start their adult lives anew, I was afforded no such clean slate. This was because both of my parents worked for Whitman. My mother, in dining services, where she planned menus and theme nights for the first-year students who lived in the residence halls: Basque, Ethiopian, asado. If I had lived on campus, she might have planned my meals too, but the financial waiver Whitman granted employees only extended to tuition, and so, I lived at home.
My father, however, had been a linguist-although not one on faculty. An autodidact who borrowed books from Whitman's Penrose Library, he taught me the difference between the six Latin cases and how to parse rural Italian dialects, all in between his facilities shifts at the college. That is, before he was buried next to my grandparents the summer before my senior year, behind the Lutheran church at the edge of town, the victim of a hit-and-run. He never told me where his love of languages had come from, just that he was grateful I shared it.
"Your dad would be so proud, Ann," Paula said.
It was the end of my shift at the restaurant where I worked, and where Paula, the hostess, had hired me almost a decade earlier, at the age of fifteen. The space was deep and narrow, with a tarnished tin ceiling, and we had left the front door open, hoping the fresh air would thin out the remaining dinner smells. Every now and then a car would crawl down the wide street outside, its headlights cutting the darkness.
"Thanks, Paula." I counted out my tips on the counter, trying my best to ignore the arcing red welts that were blooming on my forearm. The dinner rush-busier than usual due to Whitman's graduation-had forced me to stack plates, hot from the salamander, directly onto my arm. The walk from the kitchen to the dining room was just long enough that the ceramic burned with every trip.
"You know, you can always come back," said John, the bartender, who released the tap handle and passed me a shifter. We were only allowed one beer per shift, but the rule was rarely followed.
I pressed out my last dollar bill and folded the money into my back pocket. "I know."
But I didn't want to come back. My father, so inexplicably and suddenly gone, haunted every block of sidewalk that framed downtown, even the browning patch of grass in front of the restaurant. The escapes I had relied on-books and research-no longer took me far enough away.
"Even if it's fall and we don't need the staff," John continued, "we'll still hire you."
I tried to tamp down the panic I felt at the prospect of being back in Walla Walla come fall, when I heard Paula say behind me, "We're closed."
I looked over my shoulder to the front door, where a gaggle of girls had gathered, some reading the menu in the vestibule, others having pushed through the screen door, causing the CLOSED sign to slap against the wood.
"But you're still serving," said one, pointing at my beer.
"Sorry. Closed," said John.
"Oh, come on," said another. Their ...
