After a noisy upbringing as one of six children, and adulthood as a vocal feminist and mother, Sara Maitland began to crave silence. Over the past five years, she has spent periods of silence in the Sinai Desert and the Australian bush and on the Isle of Skye. She interweaves these experiences with the history of silence told through fairy tale and myth, Western and Eastern religious traditions, the Enlightenment and psychoanalysis, up to the ambivalence towards silence in contemporary society. Maitland has built a hermitage on an isolated Scottish moor, and the book culminates powerfully with her experiences of silence in this new home.

Twice before - in 1983 and 1993 - Granta has chosen twenty writers under forty whose writing represents the best promise or achievement in British fiction. Twenty years ago that list included Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Graham Swift, Pat Barker. Who are their equivalents today? Granta's panel of judges will announce its answer in January 2003. Previous experience suggests it might be controversial, but there will be no more definitive selection than Granta's. 1983 Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Julian Barnes, Ursula Bentley, William Boyd, Buchi Emecheta, Maggie Gee, Kazuo Ishiguro, Alan Judd, Adam Mars-Jones, Ian McEwan, Shiva Naipaul, Philip Norman, Christopher Priest, Salman Rushdie, Lisa St Aubin de Teran, Clive Sinclair, Graham Swift, Rose Tremain, A. N. Wilson 1993 Iain Banks, Louis de Bernieres, Anne Billson, Tibor Fischer, Esther Freud, Alan Hollinghurst, Kazuo Ishiguro, A.L. Kennedy, Philip Kerr, Hanif Kureishi, Adam Lively, Adam Mars-Jones, Candia McWilliam, Lawrence Norfolk, Ben Okri, Caryl Phillips, Will Self, Nicholas Shakespeare, Helen Simpson, Jeanette Winterso

"On The Road Again: Where travel writing went next..." features Tim Parks, on the joys of commuting from Verona to Milan every day; Christopher de Bellaigue, on tracking down the Armenians in Turkey; Jeremy Treglown, following in the footsteps of V. S. Pritchett in Spain; Jeremy Seabrook, on being separated from his twin; and, Todd McEwen, on Cary Grant's trousers. It also contains new fiction by Ann Beattie, Tessa Hadley and Claire Keegan.

Like what, exactly? Like always ready to surprise you on the stairs; like wishing you had only known; like wanting it to go on for rather longer. This issue of Granta contains lessons drawn from the muddle of experience. With: Lynn Barber on the conman who seduced her, and then her parents Kathryn Chetkovich on living with envy, bred by a partner who is more successful than she is Simon Gray on smoking, absent friends, getting old, smoking, and why Gary Cooper walked the way he did Graham Robb on how we tried to spot homosexuality, in ourselves and others. And in fiction: Nell Freudenberger: the tutor's story J. Robert Lennon: look what the cat brought home (sex) Jayne Anne Phillips: the Termite's birthday and Paul Murray Plus: 'The Steam People' , a picture essay by Robin Grierson on the glorious machines of old England, and their lovers.