Katy Hays

The Secret History meets Ninth House in this sinister, atmospheric novel following a circle of researchers as they 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.

A Novel

The Cloisters

It was coming from within me as well, a darkness I saw echoed in the saints’ fingerbones and ankle fragments, the wilderness of the unicorn tapestries and the open mouths of the gargoyles that sat along the edges of the cloisters. The whole museum, I realized—although perhaps I had always known it, always wanted to believe it—was struggling to come alive.

These were the caprices that the ancient Romans tried to rationalize with their philosophies and gods, but deep down, they knew the truth: fate was as brutal as it was providential.

Isabelle

What if our whole life - how we live and die - has already been decided for us? Would you want to know, if a role of the dice or a deal of the cards could tell you the outcome? Can life be that thin, that disturbing? What if we're all just like Caesar? Waiting on our lucky throw, refusing to see what waits for us in the idea of March. 

We are, you see, both masters of our fate and at the mercy of the Moirai - the three Fates who weave our futures and cut them short. And while I still believe we can control the little things in life, those small decisions that add up to the everyday, I think, perhaps, the overall shape of our life is not ours to decide. That shape belongs to fate. 

The Cloisters quotes

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