One of our most perceptive travel writers embarks on an exploration of the world's holiest sites 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.

In The Half-Known Life, Pico Iyer travels to the world’s holiest places. His mission: to search for Paradise on Earth. It is a spectacular journey, stretching across the globe from Srinagar in Kashmir to Varanasi on the Ganges, from Sri Lanka to Jerusalem to Japan, from the mosques of Iran to Uluru (Ayers Rock) in Australia.

In each place, Iyer hears the thoughts of the people he encounters – from taxi drivers to monks to tour guides – and draws on his own memories, from time spent in silence in a Benedictine monastery in California to his mother’s happy tales of pre-partition Kashmir to crisscrossing Japan with the Dalai Lama.

With references ranging from the Ramayana to Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson to Leonard Cohen, Iyer contemplates humanity’s impulse to search for the divine – and meditates on the dark histories and violent conflicts that too often exist side by side with religious fervour.