Heaven: A Traveller’s Guide to the Undiscovered Country

'Stanford's best book to date: chatty, opinionated and learned. Although it records the slow marginalisation of a powerful idea, it is not an obituary' Damian Thompson: Mail on Sunday 

‘Stanford’s entertaining Baedeker to the beyond makes the serious case that a geography and mythology of heaven were for a long time central to the meaning of this life and the next’ Sunday Times

‘This is a brave and fascinating attempt to chart the unknowable, mixing historical, literary and painterly depictions with personal accounts’ The Times

A personal journey, prompted by the death of his mother, through history and across religions, in the company of scientists, philosophers, bishops, artists, writers, theologians and atheists, in order to discover the place people have called heaven. Stopping off en route at various heavens on earth, it asks if heaven is a man-made put-up job to make death more palatable, or the ultimate promise?

Published in London by HarperCollins in April 2002 and in New York by Palgrave Macmillan in February 2004. Separate Russian language edition. ISBN:UK hardback 0-00-257101; UK paperback 0-00-653157-1; US hardback 1-4039-6360-6 Now also available in e-book format.