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From the acclaimed writer and journalist, a vivid and wide-ranging portrait of love, sex and loneliness in contemporary Japan

No sex. No kids. No future?

When Tom Feiling moved to Tokyo as a student in the early nineties, Japan was a beacon of the future: a rising superpower, a technology giant, and a global symbol of prosperity, civility and success. When he returned twenty-four years later, the country was still a sign of things to come - but, he began to realize, it was no longer a beacon. It was a warning.

This book offers a unique portrait of life in contemporary Japan, from the quiet of its furthest flung villages to the dynamism of its megacities. It tells the story of how, from the mid-seventies onwards, Japanese society unknowingly embarked on a vast, silent process of transformation that is still unfolding today. The country is still peaceful; it is still prosperous. But the population is shrinking. As things stand, it will fall by a third with each new generation.

Travelling through shrines and bars, rice fields and mango farms, coffee shops and old peoples' homes, Feiling meets those affected by, and driving, this transformation. Through countless interviews and extensive research, he weaves together a powerful account of how and why men and women are ceasing to pair off and have kids. He reveals how sexual appetites and behaviours are both shaped by, and reshaping the evolving economy, and considers the risks - and the opportunities - of the rise in solo living in Japan, and beyond.

Clear-sighted and surprising, Alone in Japan is a portrait of love, sex and death in contemporary Japan that should provoke and engage us all. It is an electrifying portrait of a nation on the brink by one of the most original reporters working today.

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\"Inspirational\" - The Daily Mail

\"Sarah Sands has written about stillness with an eloquence that fizzes with vitality and wit. This wonderful book charts a journey to some of the most beautiful and tranquil places on earth, and introduces us to people whose inner peace is a balm for our troubled times. I loved every page of it.\" - Nicholas Hytner

Suffering from information overload, unable to sleep, Sarah Sands, former editor of the BBC's Today programme, has tried many different strategies to de-stress... only to reject them because, as she says, all too often they threaten to become an exercise in self-absorption.

Inspired by the ruins of an ancient Cistercian abbey at the bottom of her Norfolk garden, she begins to research the lives of the monks who once resided there, and realises how much we may have to learn from monasticism.

Renouncing the world, monks and nuns have acquired a hidden knowledge of how to live: they labour, they learn and they acquire 'the interior silence'. This book is a quest for that hidden knowledge - a pilgrimage to ten monasteries round the world.

From a Coptic desert community in Egypt to a retreat in the Japanese mountains, we follow Sands as she identifies the common characteristics of monastic life and the wisdoms to be learned from them; and as she discovers, behind the cloistered walls, a clarity of mind and an unexpected capacity for solitude which enable her, after years of insomnia, to experience that elusive, dreamless sleep.

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\"Easy-going, discursive and digressive, even those to whom trains are a closed timetable will find this a charming travelogue.\" - Stuart Maconie

Join travel writer and self-confessed \"train nut\" Tom Chesshyre as he celebrates 200 years of passenger railways on a zigzagging tour around the UK - where trains (proudly) began

In a small market town in the northeast of England in 1825, something momentous happened: ticket-bearing human beings started moving along wrought-iron tracks on a contraption with engine-powered wheels. The contraption was called a \"train\". What happened in Darlington, along a 26-mile line to Stockton, would kickstart the worldwide railway revolution. Today, 1.3 million miles of tracks crisscross the planet.

To celebrate the 200th anniversary of this groundbreaking event, Tom Chesshyre embarks on a journey around the country that invented trains, taking in many heritage lines maintained by armies of enthusiasts. On a long, circular series of rides beginning and ending in Darlington, Chesshyre enjoys the scenery, seeks out the history, dodges delays (best he can), reports on the current (often shambolic) state of British railways, and lets the rhythm of the clattering tracks reveal what it is about trains - especially wonderful old trains - that we love so much.

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Under The Changing Skies

The Best of the Guardian's Country Diary, 2018-2024

by Paul Fleckney (editor)