
After a noisy upbringing as one of six children & adulthood as a vocal feminist & 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 & the Isle of Skye. She interweaves these experiences with the history of silence through fairy-tale & myth Western & Eastern religious traditions the Enlightenment & psychoanalysis up to the ambivalence towards silence in contemporary society. Maitland has built a hermitage on an isolated Scottish moor & the book culminates powerfully with her experiences of silence in this new home.