Book description
Tibet has long fascinated the West, but what really lies beyond our
romantic image of a mystical mountain kingdom of peace and
spirituality? Patrick French set out to discover the truth, and his
extraordinary account has been widely acclaimed.
Travelling through the country, French meets exiled monks, nomads
and a nun secretly fighting Chinese rule, but also young Tibetans with
a more pragmatic attitude to their situation. Interweaving these
encounters with little-known stories of war and turmoil from Tibet's
past, he reveals a more nuanced, fascinating and surprising picture of
this complex place than any other book has done.
Patrick French is a writer and historian, born in England in 1966. He
is the author of
Younghusband: The Last Great Imperial Adventurer
, which won the Somerset Maugham Award and the Royal Society of
Literature W. H. Heinemann Prize,
Liberty or Death: India's Journey
to Independence and Division
, which won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award,
Tibet,
Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land
and, most recently,
The World Is What It Is: The Authorized
Biography of V. S. Naipaul
, which was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and won the
National Book Critics Circle Award and the Hawthornden Prize.
