A Book of Silence
2008
First Published
3.76
Average Rating
320
Number of Pages
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.
Avg Rating
3.76
Number of Ratings
1,403
5 STARS
28%
4 STARS
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3 STARS
27%
2 STARS
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1 STARS
3%
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Author
Sara Maitland
Author · 19 books
Sara Maitland is a British writer and academic. An accomplished novelist, she is also known for her short stories. Her work has a magic realist tendency. Maitland is regarded as one of those at the vanguard of the 1970s feminist movement, and is often described as a feminist writer. She is a Roman Catholic, and religion is another theme in much of her work.
