Rory MacLean's new book, Geography of Heaven, is a grief memoir and travelogue in which the veteran travel writer visits sacred sites around the world in an attempt to make sense of his wife Katrin's death from cancer. Written five years after her loss, the book blends MacLean's established gift for evocative travel writing with a deeply personal, sometimes uneven, spiritual quest, and matters as a candid, if flawed, exploration of how one man tries to reconcile grief with belief.

His journey, which begins in Jerusalem, takes in more than a dozen locations including an Indian ashram, a Vipassanā retreat in Suffolk, a Native American reservation in South Dakota and an ayahuasca ceremony in Peru, alongside riskier excursions such as infiltrating a West Bank settlement shortly before the 7 October attacks. The review praises MacLean's vivid descriptive skill and thoughtful passages on Victorian spiritualism and AI-assisted grief, but criticises jarring shifts in tone, outdated language about minority groups, and a tendency to lean into numerology and unproven "proof" of Katrin's continuing presence rather than genuine scientific or sceptical scrutiny.