One of the many pleasures of fiction is its ability to take us into exotic worlds. Rumer Godden’s In This House of Brede is set in a truly unusual place—a convent of contemplative nuns whose main “work” is round-the-clock communal liturgical prayer. The nuns have separated themselves from the outside world. Why do they do this? What is their life like? What is its spiritual significance?

These are some of the questions Rumer Godden examines in In This House of Brede, a robust, character-driven novel that has long been recognized as one of the most realistic explorations of religious life in literature.

The central thread of the tale is the story of Philippa Talbot, a widow and senior civil servant in the British government who gives up her career, fashionable friends, and moneyed lifestyle to become a nun at Brede Abbey, a convent of Benedictine nuns located in a small town in the English countryside. Philippa’s coworkers and friends are shocked. Philippa herself doesn’t know if the life of the abbey will suit her. Neither do the women whom she joins at Brede. Much of the drama of the novel revolves around the testing of this unlikely vocation.

Dramatic events unfold behind the abbey walls. The aged abbess dies and is replaced by a reluctant successor who must steer the community through a great crisis. The nuns are revealed in all their vividly human talents and foibles: Dame Veronica, a poet with terrible secrets; her rival, the scholarly Dame Agnes; Sister Julian, who wants to change the world; Dame Maura, an extraordinary musician; and Sister Cecily, whose physical beauty and great musical skill are deeply unsettling to many of the sisters. The nuns are continually called on to deal with pressures from the outside world—troubled friends and family members, the church reforms of Vatican II, financial worries, and an invitation to serve in new ways.

Through it all, the nuns of Brede pray. Their life is a life of prayer: sung prayer in choir and personal prayer alone. Prayer, says one nun, “is our craft. . . . The craft of a contemplative religious, and as a good workman, an artist, loves his craft, we must delight in ours.” The nuns at Brede are flawed in many ways—overly ambitious, headstrong, strict, impatient. But they all find solace and peace in their devotion to continual prayer. Their special calling is to honor God through prayer, and to change the world by doing so.