A Book of Silence by Sara Maitland (9781847080424)
Sara Maitland Release Date: 01 November 2008 Format: Hardback Pages: 320 Category: Memoirs Publisher: Granta ISBN: 9781847080424 ISBN-10: 1847080421
After a noisy upbringing as one of six children, and adulthood as a vocal feminist and mother, Sara Maitland began to crave silence. Over the past five years, she has spent periods of silence in the Sinai desert, the Australian bush, and a remote cottage on the Isle of Skye. Her memoir of these experiences is interwoven with the history of silence through fairy-tale and myth, Western and Eastern religious traditions, the Enlightenment and psychoanalysis, up to the ambivalence towards silence in contemporary society. Maitland has built a hermitage on an isolated moor in Galloway, and the book culminates powerfully with her experiences of silence in this new home. "A Book of Silence" is a deeply thoughtful, honest and illuminating memoir about a phenomenon too often neglected in the contemporary world.