Katy Hays

Katy Hays holds a Williams College master's in art history and did doctoral work at Berkeley, then worked at the Clark Art Institute and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She now teaches art history as an adjunct and lives in Olympic Valley, California. The Cloisters, her first novel, came from Atria Books in November 2022 and became a national bestseller. Its narrator, Ann Stilwell, arrives in New York from Walla Walla, Washington, expecting a summer placement at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and is redirected instead to the Met Cloisters, where a small research team is studying the Renaissance history of the tarot. A fifteenth-century deck surfaces, and academic curiosity hardens into obsession. Reviewers reached repeatedly for Donna Tartt's The Secret History as a comparison. Saltwater followed in 2025, and a third book, Home Economics, was picked up by Sony in 2026 with Julia Roberts attached to star.