“Extraordinary’ Robert Macfarlane
“an epic of travel and a rich testament to an enduring love.” Colin Thubron
“A magnificent, heartfelt love story and a quest both ancient and entirely original.” Jay Griffiths
“An astonishing book. It tells of the determination of love, its capacity to transcend and earth, its refusal to stop before the membrane between the lovers is breached and truth – real, felt, undeniable, unmanufactured truth – emerges.” Claire Gilbert
When my wife Katrin died aged 55, I couldn’t imagine life without her. So I set out to find where she had gone. Over five years I searched for her, tracing across history and around the globe mankind’s ideas of the afterlife, seeking out places where the veil is thin. Places where our mortal world touched the divine. In Delhi, I was told ‘the universe will keep sending you loving souls to guide you on this journey’ and it did, opening doors, revealing wonders beyond my imagination, until – in five truly extraordinary moments – Katrin was beside me.
At first it had felt like coincidence and fantasy; a single beam of sunlight falling on the bridal coronet laid on her grave on an overcast day, her eyes welling with tears in a still photograph. But even as a rational thinker, even a sceptic, I’d began to meditate to try to open a space within. Then seven months to the minute after her death, she was before me. In a pitch black room, somewhere between listening and revelation, I heard, ’She will show you the way. She will let you take her hand.’
Katrin became a presence, not there yet always beside me, manifest in more encounters. Time seemed to be needed for me to ready myself. Awareness grew in intensity as my travels extended. In South Africa I woke at 4am and was embraced as never before, an electric tingling at the nape of my neck, charging down my spine and through the breadth of my chest until she was in me, around me. In the Amazon she flowed over me like a mist, a starlit luminosity that lowered onto me, her weight pushing me into the floor. I felt enveloped in a way that I could never have feigned, held not by limbs but by energy, by love. At the same time, she became less an individual and more something mysterious, something eternal. I understood the psychology of grief, the process of predictive processing when the bereaved wakes to the sound of breath on the pillow, hears their beloved’s laughter in birdsong. My experiences could be dismissed with a rational explanation but that belittled the truth. I knew that she was reaching back through the veil, saying to me, Do you finally get it? I am here. I am with you. I am here after.
Geography of Heaven: Travels to the Hereafter is the story of that journey, of moments of astonishment and awe, of steps taken with hope and love. Hope “that leads to blissful end” wrote Dante. Hope that “is of the joy to come” as the light from many a star. Hope that can be found in all the world and love that calls to our souls, love that can but lead to truth. Five years ago I would never have believed that this inexplicable enterprise could lead me out of the brokenhearted darkness to an understanding that none of us are created for naught. We are links in a golden chain, bound by connections, performing acts of love the like of which touch every life. We all are gifted brief, scattered moments of shimmering awareness that alight us in the presence of something overwhelming, something mysterious, something eternal.
To be published by Little, Brown in August 2026.
