Our Book of the Month for January 2023 is The Half Known Life: Finding Paradise in a Divided World by the former Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award winner Pico Iyer.
One of the 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.
By the end, he has upended many of our expectations and dared to suggest that we can find paradise right in the heart of our angry, confused and divided world.
“Nothing less than a guided tour of the human soul. Filled with hope, wisdom, and extraordinary tenderness, this is a book not only for the ages, but for our very specific, very troubled age. A masterpiece.” – Elizabeth Gilbert
“In elegant and ecstatic prose, Pico Iyer uncovers our wonderful capacity for hope” -Katherine May
“To step into The Half Known Life feels both a privilege and a necessity… Iyer is more than a guide or a compatriot in an unfamiliar land: in the inward journey to lucidity he is a companion of our own searching minds.” – Yiyun Li
The Half Known Life: Finding Paradise in a Divided World by Pico Iyer is available now for £16.99
Author Biography
Pico Iyer is the author of fifteen books, translated into twenty-three languages. He has been a contributor for more than thirty years to the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Time and Harper’s Magazine, and has written for many more publications worldwide, including the New York Review of Books, Granta and the Financial Times. His four recent talks for TED have received more than ten million views.