I wanted to like this book more. I found it basically a series of essays with the common thread being countries visited that have a strong belief in Paradise, and an afterlife. Many of these societies are troubled, either by political divide or supreme poverty and despotic leaders.
Will I remember this book in a few months’ time? Probably not, which is why I’m only rating it 4 stars. However, Iyer had some thought provoking moments, which I will share here:

‘Nothing can live up to the scenes that memory softens and gilds.’
‘The older I got the more I began to feel that almost everything that had happened to me, good or bad, seemed to have come out of nowhere. As Leonard Cohen put it in one of his final songs, we’re “none of us deserving the cruelty or the grace”.’
‘Troubled places often look to writers in the hope that imagination can see beyond the divisions that ideologies enforce; the writer’s job, after all, is to dismantle the very notion of an Other by showing how your hurts belong to me, as my hopes do to you.’
‘North Korea was terrifying to me because its people really did know so little of the outside world; it’s always easiest to launch a nuclear missile against an abstraction.’

And I love how he takes his eighty year old mother out to dinner every Sunday night, and as we nibbled on lentil curries, she threw open wide the magic doors of her girlhood. How I would love to hear my children speak of me in this way!