She’s no hermit. She’s not a “back to nature” survivalist. She doesn’t want to grow her own vegetables or live without cigarettes or coffee. She doesn’t want to milk her own goat or forage for wood for her fire. She just wants to live with as much silence as possible.

She shops once every four weeks and on Sundays after church buys milk and some fruit and vegetables. She aims for 80 per cent silence on the grounds that it’s good to have a target. She earns her living by teaching a distance learning creative writing course but for two days a week she unplugs the phone and, with it, the internet and e-mail.

She tries to limit social activities to a maximum of six days a month, but unexpected things happen: friends and family come to visit, and sometimes the postman needs a signature.

For over twenty years Sara Maitland cherished her noisy life in London. She called herself a yakker. “All my life I have talked and talked…whether it was at parties, meetings or feminist consciousness-raising groups. If I am ever asked to be in Who’s Who, I will put as my hobby deipnosophy, banter-like exchanges round a dinner table.”

However, in 2000, she decided to embrace silence to reach a deeper self and a fullness that she found terrifyingly satisfying. It was the beginning of A Book of Silence that built itself slowly over the next eight years.

She moved to Skye, in the desert, in Weardale, and finally in an isolated cottage in Galloway, and her memoir travelled with her. She documented the lives of ocean sailors, artic explorers, hermits, meditators and compared her insights with those of many poets, mystics, teachers and writers.

A friend of hers once told her that silence was an enemy; it was a lack of life. She questions the fear of silence in our culture and why we try so hard to eliminate it. “I am convinced that as a whole society we are losing something precious in our increasingly silence-avoiding culture and that somehow, whatever this silence might be, it needed holding, nourishing and unpacking,” she insists.

A Book of Silence is thrilling and intimate. “It is every bit as awe-inspiring and mind-blowing as any trip up Everest,” says the Sunday Book Review.

Published in 2008.