A Book of Silence, By Sara Maitland

"... Her marriage "disintegrated" in the late 1980s. She "ran out of steam" as a writer. She went through "a phase of extremely vivid and florid 'voice hearing', or auditory hallucinations". She converted to Roman Catholicism. She moved out of the vicarage in the East End, bought a cottage in a tiny village in Northamptonshire, tested solitary life on Skye, moved to a house on a high moor near Durham, and finally to a remote moorland dwelling in Galloway, the landscape of her childhood.

For her, silence and solitude are "inextricably intertwined... I am a deeply socialised person; when I am with other people I find it nearly impossible not to be aware of them, and that awareness breaks up the silence." The greater the quiet, the more God can fill it. God is synonymous with silence. "

Review of "A Book of Silence", By Sara Maitland, Independent, 14 November 2008

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