Rory MacLean - Geography of Heaven

Five years ago, the travel writer Rory MacLean lost his wife, Katrin.

She was 55 and they had been married for 32 years.

Katrin had been his first reader, accompanying him on numerous trips, including from Berlin to Moscow after the fall of the Wall the subject of Stalins Nose, his bestselling debut.

He couldnt imagine life without her.To try to make sense of this loss, MacLean set out in search of where she had gone.

A rationalist with a wishy-washy faith at best, he had been surprisingly moved by a single ray of sunshine that had fallen on his wifes ashes in a churchyard.

Could there be an afterlife? A place where love endured?Over the next few years, he travelled the globe in search of sacred places where the veil between life and death is thin, a journey which he captures in his profoundly moving, genre- bending new book, Geography of Heaven: Travels to the Hereafter.

Five years ago, he writes, I would never have believed that this inexplicable enterprise could guide me out of the darkness.

To understand that none of us are created for naught.