The Guardian published its review of Rory MacLean's Geography of Heaven on 4 August 2026, a book in which the veteran travel writer spends five years hunting for meaning after his wife Katrin dies of cancer. Katrin, MacLean writes, was the "fixed point" in his life for 32 years. Her death sends him to more than a dozen sacred sites across the world, from Jerusalem to an ashram in India, a Vipassanā meditation retreat in Suffolk, a Native American community in South Dakota, a sangoma's practice in South Africa, and an ayahuasca ceremony in Peru (The Guardian).

MacLean is no stranger to extreme journeys. His travel writing career has included flying a handbuilt plane over Crete and riding with a drug warlord in Burma. In Geography of Heaven, he infiltrates an Israeli settlement in the West Bank weeks before the 7 October attacks, seeking to recreate the biblical conditions under which Jacob dreamed of a ladder to heaven. He faces an oncoming tornado in the United States and spends two days travelling to a Buddhist festival in Bhutan along a narrow ledge road. At the Rosebud Sioux Reservation, he witnesses a ritual involving trance-like dancing and offerings of flesh.

The book is not only a travelogue. MacLean becomes fixated on numerology, calculating when Katrin might be reincarnated, and compiles evidence he believes proves her soul lives on. The Guardian's review notes that the book also includes thoughtful discussions of Victorian spiritualism — the 19th-century movement built around claims of contact with the dead — and the use of artificial intelligence to bypass grief.

The review is mixed. It criticises the book for using outdated language about minority groups and for repeatedly describing women's appearances. It describes jarring tonal shifts across the narrative. And it characterises MacLean as "a more cantankerous Michael Palin" — a comparison to the British comedian and travel documentarian known for his genial on-screen warmth, offered here to suggest a sharper, more irritable presence on the page.

MacLean's project sits in a crowded subgenre. Grief memoirs — first-person narratives of mourning — have become a publishing mainline over the past decade, and the form increasingly blends personal loss with reportage, philosophy or spiritual inquiry. Geography of Heaven folds all three into a single itinerary, carried by an author whose instinct is to keep moving rather than sit still with sorrow. Whether that movement earns the reader's trust is, in the end, a judgement the review leaves to the book itself.