Featured on The Book Show on Sky Arts on 3 March 2011.
Spare like the landscape he depicts, Colin Thubron writes of the landscape of Tibet and the pilgrimage route to Mount Kailas, sacred to Hindus and Buddhists but rarely visited by Westerners. Religion runs through each step of the journey, searching, explaining and showing us a land imbued with religious thought and practice. Described as the most personal of his journeys yet, a journey of mind and body.
"A superb account of a pilgrimage. . . . Characteristically beautiful, though uncharacteristically haunted." --Pico Iyer, New York Review of Books
"Thubron walks for the dead and writes for the living, and I can't remember when I have been so thoroughly and deeply moved by an author's outward journey inward." --Bob Shacochis, Boston Globe
New York Times bestselling author Colin Thubron returns with a moving, intimate, and exquisitely crafted travel memoir recounting his pilgrimage to the Hindu and Buddhist holy mountain of Kailas--whose peak represents the most sacred place on Earth to roughly a quarter the global population. With echoes of Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard, Peter Hessler's Country Driving, and Paul Theoroux's Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Thubron's follow up to his bestselling Shadow of the Silk Road will illuminate, interest, and inspire anyone interested in traveling the world or journeying into the soul.
Colin Thubron is an acknowledged master of travel writing, and the winner of many prizes and awards. His first writing was about the Middle East - Damascus, Lebanon and Cyprus. In 1982 he travelled into the Soviet Union in an ancient Morris Marina, pursued by the KGB, a journey he recorded in Among the Russians. From these early experiences developed his classic travel books: Behind the Wall (winner of the Hawthornden Prize and the Thomas Cook Travel Award), The Lost Heart of Asia, In Siberia (Prix Bouvier) and Shadow of the Silk Road (all available in Vintage). In 2010 Colin Thubron became President the Royal Society of Literature.
