From the acclaimed author of Video Night in Kathmandu comes this intriguing new book that deciphers the dream-life -- the personal impact -- of globalization and the rising tide of worldwide displacement. A resident "nowherian" himself -- born in England of Indian parents, raised in America, and currently living in Japan -- Pico Iyer takes us on a tour of the transnational village that our world has become.

Beginning in Los Angeles International Airport, where town life -- shops, services, sociability -- is available without a town, Iyer goes to Hong Kong, where people actually live in self-contained hotels, and to Toronto, which has been given new life and a new literature by its immigrant population. He explores Atlanta's Olympic Village, which seems to interpret universalism in a corporate more than truly human way. Ultimately Iyer takes us to Japan, where amid alien surfaces and an apartment building ironically called The Memphis, he discovers a kind of belonging. Written with keen perception and lucid prose, The Global Soul is a thought provoking examination of what the word "home" can possibly mean in a world whose face is blurred by its cultural fusion and its alarmingly rapid rate of change.