To a Mountain in Tibet: A Haunting and Intimate Memoir of Pilgrimage, Loss, and the Journey to Mount Kailas (P.S.) - Softcover

Thubron, Colin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0061768278 ISBN 13: 9780061768279

Publisher: Perennial, 2012

Synopsis

"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.

In the shadow of the world’s most sacred mountain, a solitary traveler confronts the ghosts of his past.

• A Journey for the Dead: As the last of his family passes away, an author undertakes an arduous pilgrimage not for salvation, but for remembrance.
• Himalayan Travel: From the remote valleys of Nepal to the stark, wind-scorched plains of Tibet, this is an intimate portrait of a landscape and its people, captured in spare, luminous prose.
• A Spiritual Quest: Thubron explores the overlapping worlds of Hindu and Buddhist faith with a scholar’s mind and a pilgrim’s heart, questioning what it means to seek the sacred in an age of disbelief.
• Literary Memoir: A moving meditation on mortality, solitude, and the pull of the unknown from Colin Thubron, one of the most revered travel writers of our time.

About this title

About the Author

Colin Thubron is an acclaimed travel writer and novelist. His first books were about the Middle East – Damascus, Lebanon and Cyprus. In 1982 he travelled by car into the Soviet Union, a journey he described in Among the Russians. From these early experiences developed his classic travel books: Behind the Wall: A Journey through China (winner of the Hawthornden Prize and the Thomas Cook Travel Award), The Lost Heart of Asia, In Siberia (Prix Bouvier), Shadow of the Silk Road and To a Mountain in Tibet.

Among other honors, Colin Thubron has received the Ness award of the Royal Geographical Society and the Livingstone Memorial Medal of the Royal Society for Asian Affairs. In 2007 he was made CBE. He was elected President of the Royal Society of Literature from 2010 to 2017, and named an RSL Companion of Literature in 2020.

From the Back Cover

Colin Thubron's To a Mountain in Tibet is a memoir of discovery and loss, chronicling the author's journey to the holiest mountain on earth, the solitary peak of Kailas in modern-day Tibet. To Buddhists and Hindus, it is the mystic heart of the world and an ancient site of pilgrimage. It has never been climbed.

Thubron undertakes this journey in the wake of his mother's death, using the pilgrimage as a lens to examine both his deeply felt loss and his lifelong need for solitude, which has shaped his career as a writer—one who travels to places far outside his own history and culture. A vivid and powerful travelogue through an evocative landscape, To a Mountain in Tibet provides a fascinating encounter with the mythic and spiritual traditions of a foreign culture—encapsulated in the wondrous insights of an intimate personal voyage.

Edition details

• Publisher: Perennial
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0061768278
• ISBN 13: 9780061768279
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256