From the Holy Mountain

Produktbeschreibung

The third book from the most gifted young travel writer at work today, author of the best-selling In Xanadu ('one of the best travel books produced in the last twenty years' -- Scotland on Sunday) and City of Djinns ('the best travel book I have ever read' -- George Mackay Brown). In the spring of 587 AD, two monks set off on an extraordinary journey that would take them in an arc across the entire Byzantine world, from the shores of the Bosphorus to the sand dunes of Egypt. On the way John Moschos and his pupil Sophronius the Sophist stayed in caves, monasteries and remote hermitages, collecting the wisdom of the stylites and the desert fathers before their world shattered under the great eruption of Islam. More than a thousand years later, using Moschos's writings as his guide, William Dalrymple set off to retrace their footsteps. Despite centuries of isolation, a surprising number of the monasteries and churches visited by the two monks still survive today, surrounded by often hostile populations. Dalrymple's pilgrimage took him through a bloody civil war in eastern Turkey, the ruins of Beirut, the vicious tensions of the West Bank and a fundamentalist uprising in southern Egypt. His book is an elegy to the slowly dying civilisation of Eastern Christianity and the peoples that have kept its flame alive. It is a rich and gripping blend of history and spirituality, adventure and politics, laced with a thread of black comedy familiar to readers of Dalrymple's previous work. 

Autoreninfo

William Dalrymple, 1965 in Schottland geboren, lebt seit über zwanzig Jahren in Indien. Bereits mit zweiundzwanzig Jahren zog es ihn nach Asien, auf dieser Reise entstand sein erstes gefeiertes Buch In Xanadu. Seitdem gilt er als einer der besten englisch sprachigen Reiseschriftsteller und erhielt für seine Bücher alle erdenklichen Preise, u. a. 2006 den britischen Duff Cooper Prize und 2007 den indischen Cross word Book Award. Er schreibt regel mäßig Beiträge für den New Yorker, den New Statesman und den Guardian. Mit seiner Frau und drei Kindern lebt er auf einer Farm in der Nähe von Neu-Delhi. 2009 rief er das Jaipur Literature Festival ins Leben, das schon heute als herausragendes Treffen für hochrangige internationale Autoren gilt.