Description

One of our most perceptive travel writers embarks on an exploration of the world's holiest places and where we might find paradise on Earth.

It's so easy, I thought, to place Paradise in the past or the future - anywhere but here.

After half a century of travel, from Ethiopia to Tibet, from Belfast to Jerusalem, Pico Iyer asks himself what kind of paradise can ever be found in a world of unceasing conflict. In a spectacular journey, both inward and outward, Iyer roams from crowded mosques in Iran to a film studio in North Korea, from a holy mountain in Japan to the sometimes spooky emptiness of the Australian outback.

At every stop, he makes connections with unexpected strangers - mystics and taxi drivers and fellow travellers - and draws on his own memories, of time spent in a Benedictine monastery high above the Pacific, of regular travels with the Dalai Lama, of hearing his late mother speak of sunlit moments in pre-Partition India.