The Cloister

From National Book Award-winning writer James Carroll comes a novel of the timeless love story of Abelard and Heloise, and its impact on a modern priest and a Holocaust survivor seeking sanctuary in Manhattan.

Father Michael Kavanagh is shocked to see a friend from his seminary days at the altar of his humble Inwood community parish – a friend who was forced to leave the seminary under scandalous circumstances. Forced to reconsider the past, Father Kavanagh wanders into the medieval haven of the Cloisters and stumbles into a conversation with a lovely and intriguing docent, Rachel Vedette. Rachel, a scholar of medieval history, has retreated to the quiet of the Cloisters after her harrowing experience as a Jewish woman in France during the Holocaust. She remains obsessed with her late father’s greatest intellectual work- a study demonstrating the relationship between the famously discredited monk Peter Abelard and Jewish scholars. Feeling an odd connection with Father Kavanagh, Rachel shares with him the work that cost her father his life. At the center of these interrelated stories is the classic romance between the great scholar Peter Abelard and his intellectual equal, Heloise. For Rachel, Abelard is the key to understanding her people’s place in intellectual history. And for Father Kavanagh, the controversial theologian may be a doorway to understanding the life he himself might have had outside the Church.