Sara Maitland

Sara Maitland is a novelist and short story writer. Born in 1950, she grew up in Galloway and studied at Oxford University. Her first novel, Daughters of Jerusalem, was published in 1978 and won the Somerset Maugham Award. This has been followed by several more novels including Three Times Table (1990), Home Truths (1993) and Brittle Joys (1999), and one co-written with Michelene Wandor – Arky Types (1987).

Her non-fiction on religious subjects includes A Big-Enough God: Artful Theology (1994), Novel Thoughts: Religious Fiction in Contemporary Culture (1999), and Awesome God: Creation, Commitment and Joy (2002). She has also written Vesta Tilley (1986) and, with Peter Matthews, a book about gardening – Gardens of Illusion (2000).

Her short stories are regularly broadcast and collections include Telling Tales (1983), A Book of Spells (1987) and most recently, On Becoming a Fairy Godmother (2003), a collection of magical realist tales about middle age. She was recently named in the Guardian’s list of ‘the one hundred most important women public intellectuals’.
http://www.saramaitland.com

Books by Sara Maitland

The Book of SilenceA Book of Silence

After a noisy upbringing as one of six children, and adulthood as a vocal feminist and mother amidst the busy life of a vicarage, Maitland began to crave silence more and more strongly - and discovered she had this in common with other menopausal women. Over the past five years, she has spent periods of silence in the Sinai desert, the Australian bush, and a remote cottage on Skye. Her memoirs of these experiences will be interwoven with the history of silence through fairy-tale and primal myth, Western and Eastern religious spiritual traditions, the Enlightenment and 20th century psychoanalysis, up to the current ambivalence towards silence in contemporary society. Maitland has now bought a small ruin on an isolated moor on the Galloway/Ayrshire border, which she is rebuilding as a hermitage. The book will culminate with her experiences of silence in this new home.

‘This is not a silent book, intimate and generous as it is...Nor did Maitland’s book leave me speechless. Instead, I found myself arguing, conversing, exclaiming at every page. I wanted to be with her every step of the way. And I can hardly wait to see what comes next from this marvellous writer, thinker, seeker.’ New York Times

‘Maitland is a bold adventurer and the rest of us, doubtless ill-equipped to deal with the emotional and intellectual challenge of self-sought solitude, are lucky she can give the condition of silence such an articulate voice’. Metro

‘A Book of Silence grapples with ideas at the very heart of what it is to be human, and Sara Maitland is a joyous champion of the countercultural notion that silence is more than simply an absence of noise’. Times

‘A timely and alluring exploration of the pleasures and powers of silence; Maitland writes with the serenity of one who has just returned from a place where I would very much like to go.’
Tim Parks

‘This book is partly a cultural history of silence which considers fairy-tales and flotation tanks, solitary confinement and religious orders, but mainly it’s a beautiful and serene memoir about trying to find inner (and outer) peace in a cacophonous world. I adored it.’
Caroline Sanderson, The Bookseller

World volume rights: Granta
UK : Granta, November 2008
United States: Counterpoint
Spain: Alba
Estonia: Esti Paevaleht
Italy: Cairo Editore
China : Changjiang Literature & Art Publishing House
Holland: Scriptum
Sweden : Cordia

Sara Maitland is represented at Jenny Brown Associates by Jenny - .

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