Search results for ""Author Sarah Sands""

If you buy one book this year make sure it''s this one... Enchanting.Daily MailThis charming book weaves hedgehogs into our hearts, our lives and our national identity.John WitherowA few days after her elderly father is admitted to hospital, Sarah Sands and her grandson find a poorly hedgehog in the garden. They name her Peggy, and her fate becomes a matter of pressing concern.There is something about hedgehogs - homely and yet mysterious, prickly and defenceless, wild and tame - that makes us feel deeply sympathetic to them.Having managed to outlive roads, dogs, strimmers and pesticides, hedgehogs are now an endangered species. For Sarah Sands, our failure to protect them is a symptom of our alienation from the living world.But all is not yet lost. In this charming book, Sands explores the meaning and morals of hedgehogs, and finds, in hedgehog world, a source of deep solace and wisdom.

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"Inspirational" - The Daily Mail"Sarah Sands has written about stillness with an eloquence that fizzes with vitality and wit. This wonderful book charts a journey to some of the most beautiful and tranquil places on earth, and introduces us to people whose inner peace is a balm for our troubled times. I loved every page of it." - Nicholas HytnerSuffering from information overload, unable to sleep, Sarah Sands, former editor of the BBC's Today programme, has tried many different strategies to de-stress... only to reject them because, as she says, all too often they threaten to become an exercise in self-absorption.Inspired by the ruins of an ancient Cistercian abbey at the bottom of her Norfolk garden, she begins to research the lives of the monks who once resided there, and realises how much we may have to learn from monasticism.Renouncing the world, monks and nuns have acquired a hidden knowledge of how to live: they labour, they learn and they acquire 'the interior silence'. This book is a quest for that hidden knowledge - a pilgrimage to ten monasteries round the world.From a Coptic desert community in Egypt to a retreat in the Japanese mountains, we follow Sands as she identifies the common characteristics of monastic life and the wisdoms to be learned from them; and as she discovers, behind the cloistered walls, a clarity of mind and an unexpected capacity for solitude which enable her, after years of insomnia, to experience that elusive, dreamless sleep.

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A beautifully written story about the end of life, in which hedgehogs become a metaphor for hopeIt is the Winter Solstice and Sarah Sands is sitting by her father's bedside, bracing herself for loss. What her father needs to do, she thinks, is conserve his energy - to hibernate like a hedgehog. When the hedgehog curls up in its bed of leaves, its heart rate slows, its body temperature drops and for months there it remains, hardly breathing at all.A few days earlier, Sarah and her grandson had found a poorly hedgehog in the garden and taken it to the local hedgehog sanctuary. They named her Peggy, and her fate had become a matter of pressing concern. When death looms, it's easier to talk about hedgehogs. There is something about these homely and yet mysterious creatures - prickly and defenceless, wild and tame - that, as Ted Hughes put it, makes us feel deeply sympathetic towards them.Hedgehogs have captured the imagination of poets and philosophers for centuries. They have managed to outlive roads, dogs, strimmers and pesticides, but now they are an endangered species. For Sarah Sands, our failure to protect them is a symptom of our alienation from the living world. But all is not yet lost. In this charming, idiosyncratic book, she explores the meaning and morals of hedgehogs, and finds, in hedgehog world, a source of deep solace and wisdom.

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