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New Habits: Today's Women who Choose to Become Nuns

by Isabel Losada

Hodder pounds 7.99 THE cover of Isabel Losada's collection of interviews with novice nuns insinuates an ambiguity that the author is at pains throughout to refute. The cover is entirely black except for a small photograph at the centre, depicting a smiling young woman dressed in a formal nun's habit, with one hand resting on what appear to be the bars of a gate which are raised in front of her face. A nun's experience is either a happy one in spite of imprisonment, or because of it, it would seem to say. Losada has gathered 10 interviews with women from the ages of 23 to 54, inviting them to …