The Interior Silence Sarah Sands, £12.99, Short Books In our noisy, addictive, 24-hour Digital Age, seeking "inner silence" seems to be a growing literary genre. The quest for our inner nun, or monk, seems to be hitting a chord with many. At least that is the message of Sarah Sands’s beautifully written, self-deprecating, self-doubting, and fortunately timed book about her journey to 10 monasteries in search of the secrets of what we can learn from the monastic life. We’re never quite sure exactly what sort of spiritual quest Sands is embarking on as her choice of monasteries is so eclectic, plural and inter-faith. What we do know is that as Sands approaches 60, she itches to take a sabbatical from her adrenaline deadline junkie VIP life as producer of The Today Programme. Despite rising at the same pre-dawn hours of a nun, or Buddhist monk, her BBC life is the opposite of a divinely ordered calm existence. She is under daily siege by email, day and night. She drinks, indulges herself with luxury face creams and bath oils, and her diary is filled not with the discipline of compline and vespers but rather the whirligig of daily attendance at the best tables of London’s chicest restaurants followed by parties until she flops into bed. It’s time for that new lockdown cliche: a life "reset". The nagging question she asks herself is "what does it mean to live a full life?"