"Bloomsbury presents The Half Known Life written and read by Pico Iyer.
'Nothing less than a guided tour of the human soul ... A masterpiece' Elizabeth Gilbert
'A work of spiritual evolution [and] inner journeys told through extraordinary exteriors' Washington Post
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, 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, he roams the globe from Jerusalem to Belfast to North Korea, from crowded mosques in Iran to a holy mountain in Japan. By the end, he has upended any of our expectations and dared to suggest that we can find paradise right in the heart of our angry and confused world. C 2023 Janklow & Nesbit Associates (New York) P 2023 Penguin Random House LLC"
"Bloomsbury presents A Beginner's Guide to Japan by Pico Iyer, read by Sartaj Garewal.
Winner of the Edward Stanford Travel Memoir of the Year 2020
A playful and profound guidebook full of surprising, brief, incisive glimpses into Japanese culture
Pico Iyer has been living around Kyoto for more than thirty-two years, but he admits at the outset of this book that he sometimes feels he knows less now than when he arrived. In the constantly surprising pages that follow, he shows how an evening with Meryl Streep, a walk through a ghostly deer park, even a call to the local Apple service centre can open up his adopted home in fresh and invigorating ways.
Why does anime make sense in an animist culture? How might Oscar Wilde reveal a culture too often associated with conformity? How can Japanese friends in a typical neighbourhood turn every stereotype on its head? His provocations may infuriate you – may even infuriate himself – Iyer confesses in his opening salvo, but maybe it’s only by setting its love hotels next to its baseball stadia, its wild fashions against its eighth-century values, that Japan can be made new again for both the first-time visitor and the jaded foreign resident. C 2023 Janklow & Nesbit Associates (New York) P 2019 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC"
"Bloomsbury presents Autumn Light by Pico Iyer, read by Sartaj Garewal.
For decades now, Pico Iyer has been based for much of the year in Nara, Japan, where he and his Japanese wife, Hiroko, share a two-room apartment. But when his father-in-law dies suddenly, calling him back to Japan earlier than expected, Iyer begins to grapple with the question we all have to live with: how to hold on to the things we love, even though we know that we and they are dying.
In a country whose calendar is marked with occasions honouring the dead, this question has a special urgency and currency. Iyer leads us through the autumn following his father-in-law’s death, introducing us to the people who populate his days: his ailing mother-in-law, who often forgets that her husband has died; his absent brother-in-law, who severed ties with his family years ago but to whom Hiroko still writes letters; and the men and women in his ping-pong club, who, many years his senior, traverse their autumn years in different ways. And as the maple leaves begin to redden and the heat begins to soften, Iyer offers us a singular view of Japan, in the season that reminds us to take nothing for granted. C 2023 Janklow & Nesbit Associates (New York) P 2019 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC"
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