Yeah I know I’ve featured the Magnus Mills book shown on the right in a Daily Bookshot before, but I couldn’t resist featuring Three to See the King by Magnus Mills (Flamingo ISBN: 0007110472) again, alongside a book I’ve just picked up that I’ve been really wanting to read for a while now – A Book of Silence by Sara Maitland (Granta. ISBN: 9781847080424)
Both locations shown on these covers exemplify what really appeals to me – living in absolute solitude. One is of course the fictional landscape depicted in Mills’ fable, in which the principle character lives in a tin hut on a sprawling plain, and the other is the remote Galloway home of Sara Maitland.
Peace. Quiet. Solitude. Maitland’s book is all about her search for silence and that’s why I’m drawn to it so much. Here’s the cover blurb:
In her late forties, after a noisy upbringing as one of six children, and adulthood as a vocal feminist and mother, Sara Maitland found herself living alone in the country, and, to her surprise, she fell in love with silence. In this fascinating, intelligent book, in a wonderfully confiding, direct and witty voice, Mailtand describes how she set out to explore this new love, spending periods of silence in the Sinai desert, the Scottish hills and a remote cottage on the Isle of Skye. She finds her own experiences, both euphoric and dark, mirrored in the accounts of others who have experienced silence – from explorers and mystics to long distance sailors. And she delves deep into the rich cultural history of silence, exploring its significance in fairytale and myth, its importance to the Western and Eastern religious traditions, its use in psychoanalysis and artistic expression, and contemporary society’s increasing fear of it.
I guess it’s also quite appropriate that I did feature Three to See the King again. It offers me the opportunity to give a timely reminder that Mills’ new novel, The Maintenance of Headway, is published next month (August 3rd) by Bloomsbury.
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