Rumer Godden

Set in England, this is a novel about a successful career woman in her forties who renounces the world to enter Brede monastery, a cloistered order of English Benedictine nuns and what happens to her thereafter.

After she is orphaned, seven-year-old Kizzy, who has lived as a Romany, or Gypsy, all her life, must face a small English town's intolerance and find herself a new home and family.