A Silent Melody: An Experience of Contemporary Spiritual Life - Hardcover

Shirley du Boulay was for twelve years a television producer in the religious department of the BBC. She resigned in 1978 and has since written several books, including one on pilgrimage and biographies of Desmond Tutu, Dame Cicely Saunders, St Teresa of Avila, Bede Griffiths and Abhishiktananda.

'In this intriguing book, Shirley du Boulay's life-long spiritual search is described with her ever-fresh honesty and concludes with a rare expression of deep content. As the best religious biographer of her generation she has now shared herself in an inspiring spritual autobiography. By being set in the context of the transformation of religious consciousness over the past fifty years it is also a richly informative story. Through her eyes and self-awareness, her consistency and her own changes of direction, we see better what we are all passing through today. It is a valuable and fascinating perspective on the modern meaning of religion born of one woman's interior journey and the struggle of a whole culture to rediscover depth and meaning.'

Laurence Freeman OSB , Director of the World Community for Christian Meditation

'A Silent Melody' has a lot to say both to people who are religious and to people who are not. The strength of the book lies in the personal nature of its account of one woman's religious history at the end of the second millennium. Shirley du Boulay is clear about her doubts, her confusions, her changing allegiances, and her constant attempts to remain honest and open to all kinds of experience, and she writes with a light and certain touch that is a pleasure to read. Whatever we think about religion, the book's real value, I think, is in its unconscious revelation of a personality that embodies that most important quality of all, goodness.'

Philip Pullman , author, His Dark Materials Trilogy