Hello there, I’m Sarah.

I’m a writer whose work centres on beauty and grief, story and quiet. I think that the stories we tell about suffering will shape the whole of our lives. I’m trying to write well about my own sorrow, and my own encounters with the beauty that defied my darkness and drew me into a life of creativity, quiet, and wonder.

I studied theology at Wycliffe Hall in Oxford (B.Th, MSt) with a focus on theodicy. My most recent book is Reclaiming Quiet, (Baker Books, November 2024), written to answer my own questions about what it means to have a quiet mind in a fallen, screen-driven world. What does it mean to have quiet as a homeland of the self? What is the shape of a quiet life? How may we retain a quiet mind, a listening heart, a wondering eye in the midst of a frenzied, disordered, distracted world?

I’ve also written This Beautiful Truth: How God’s Goodness Breaks Into Our Darkness (Baker Books, June 2021). It’s the story of my own wrestle with mental illness and the beauty that pervaded and transformed my darkness and taught me to hunger after hope.

(I've also authored a number of other books, you can find them here.)

 

Someday, I’ll write a novel… but it’s still growing in my mind.

You can connect with me most easily by signing up for my Substack newsletter, From the Vicarage. I write here about life as I find it in my corner of England, and I regularly feature a book, a glimpse of beauty, and a word of theology I am pondering. Instagram is where you can find me on fairly regular basis, thinking about good books, and the making of beauty in the company of small souls, and the challenges of online life. Occasionally, you might also catch me reading aloud a poem. Patreon is where I’m cultivating literary fellowship of souls round the sharing of good words and books. We talk the power of story and the grace of fiction and the day-weaving wonder of words.

In the meantime, I read many novels and listen to a great deal of music, and drink as many cups of coffee and tea as I can get away with in a day. I’m wife to a marvelous Dutchman named Thomas, mother of the elfin Lilian, the hobbit-child Samuel, the benevolent fairy Lucie, and the wee sprite Elanor. We make our abode (and I do my writing) from an old English vicarage in Oxford, with a giant willow woman in the garden. And I hope that someone will on day say of me when I die what William McGreel said of his wife Elizabeth Yates (a writer): She has plenty of courage, a strong faith, and a native expectancy of good. Living with her is a high adventure.

I am so very glad you are here. 
My Beauty keep you as you go.