"Powerful, poetic, transformative."—Tara Brach, author of Radical Acceptance\"Henry Shukman is one of the wisest and most poetical teachers of dharma we have today. In an increasingly fragmented world, he is unusually good company."—Sam HarrisNew York Times bestselling author of Waking Up and host of the Making Sense podcast\\The essential meditation guide for the twenty-first century: renowned mindfulness teacher Henry Shukman replaces the concept of original sin with original love, teaching us to tap into the love that shapes our world and can transform who we are.An increasing number of people today feel disconnected, disengaged, and lonely. Many of us are seeking solace, beginning with ourselves. Original Love is the secular spiritual handbook we need to ease our troubles and find the highest possible happiness.Henry Shukman, spiritual director of Mountain Cloud Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, provides a way forward based on four paths—Mindfulness, Support, Absorption, and Awakening—that promote growth and healing through meditation for practitioners of any level. And it works! Shukman includes inspiring stories from the students of his Original Love program that reveal how it has transformed their lives.Urgently needed, Original Love helps us create peace for ourselves and our times byreducing stress, anxiety, and depression;relaxing the mind and body;easing feelings of worry, regret, anger, and irritation;and improving decision-making and executive functioning.Finding a sense of love is a critical purpose of meditation. Finding your way back to the loving peace that lives at the center of things is Original Love.

"Powerful, poetic, transformative."—Tara Brach, author of Radical Acceptance"Henry Shukman is one of the wisest and most poetical teachers of dharma we have today. In an increasingly fragmented world, he is unusually good company."—Sam HarrisNew York Times bestselling author of Waking Up and host of the Making Sense podcast, he essential meditation guide for the twenty-first century: renowned Zen master and mindfulness teacher Henry Shukman replaces the concept of original sin with original love, teaching us to tap into the love that shapes our world and can transform who we are.An increasing number of people today feel disconnected, disengaged, and lonely. Many of us are seeking solace, beginning with ourselves. Original Love is the secular spiritual handbook for inner peace we need to ease our troubles and find the highest possible happiness.Henry Shukman, spiritual director of Mountain Cloud Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, provides a way forward based on four paths—Mindfulness, Support, Absorption, and Awakening—that promote spiritual growth and healing through meditation for practitioners of any level. And it works! Shukman includes inspiring stories from the students of his Original Love program that reveal how it has transformed their lives.Urgently needed, Original Love helps us create peace for ourselves and our times byreducing stress, anxiety, and depression;relaxing the mind and body;easing feelings of worry, regret, anger, and irritation;and improving decision-making and executive functioning.Finding a sense of love is a critical purpose of meditation. Finding your way back to the loving peace that lives at the center of things is Original Love.

Jim Rogers once had everything: a successful career, the love of a beautiful woman, a Manhattan penthouse and more money than he knew what to do with. Now it had all gone wrong and he was in a seedy hotel in Panama realising that the prostitute he'd just been with had stolen his wallet. Though it wasn't the money he was worried about but a sheet of folded paper, which he'd just been given by the mysterious Albert Jones: a piece of paper that might have saved his life. The search for the girl and the stolen document lead the two men deep into the Darien archipelago - a primitive, treacherous idyll that seems like Paradise but may in fact be Hell. The short novel, Darien Dogs, and the four stories that accompany it, mark the fictional debut of an assured and thrillingly gifted writer.

In this psychologically complex and darkly humorous debut collection, awardwinning writer Henry Shukman introduces an unforgettable cast of characters, travelers whose certain paths around the world lead invariably back to the uncertain self. In “The Garden of God” an aging, ailing war reporter reflects on his adventures covering a little-known conflict in the Sahara and the precipitous and disgraced end of his career; In “Old Providence,” a dissolute artist mourns a lost love and the “bloody perfect island” where, through his own callow foolishness, he lost her. In “Darien Dogs” a man goes south to Panama, desperate for a business deal that will restore his finances and sense of mastery, only to find himself on a confounding search for a beautiful, mysterious woman and his stolen wallet. By turns full of suspense, farce and poignance, always alive with energy and atmosphere, these are the stories of a gifted and assured writer.From the Trade Paperback edition.

With this assured and powerful first collection, Henry Shukman springs fully-formed into the poetry world, having already won a raft of prizes for individual poems. His sensibility is unique, engaging and immediate; we are drawn into the worlds of these poems by his accurate eye, his sensual line and the warmth of his communion with the scene he describes. Ranging across the globe, from Mexico to Japan, from the States to Southern England, these poems can be lyrical and deeply affecting, wryly funny or wildly imaginative. From a lonely mother attempting to learn the piano to a ski-jump that never ends, from a redemptive encounter with horses on a cold day to a miraculous bowl of chicken soup, these poems display a vibrancy and variety rarely seen in contemporary poetry. But Shukman's great strength is in the domestic: the complexities of love, and the rites of passage of childhood and parenthood, are re-entered with candor, grace and originality. In Doctor No's Garden is an affectionate, refreshing debut, striking in its imagery and insight, remarkable for its lightness of touch and emotional weight.

Former foreign correspondent Charles Mortimer is all washed up, living a hand-to-mouth existence in Manhattan, wondering how things could have gone so wrong for him. A chance discovery of a newspaper obituary takes him back to the beginning of his career, when he was a young, hopeful man reporting from the Sahara Desert in the company of beautiful French photographer Celeste Dumas. The two narrowly escape death by bullet, grenade, thirst and heatstroke and, ultimately, drowning. By the end of their adventure, Mortimer has begun his life as a successful, cynical journalist. Fifteen years roll by, and Mortimer finds himself again in Algeria, where he perpetrates the great error of his professional life and realizes, finally, what it was he lost so long ago in the desert wastes.By the winner of the Author's Club First Novel Award, Guardian First Book Award and The Times First Book Award.

Jim Rogers once had everything: a successful career, the love of a beautiful woman, a Manhattan penthouse and more money than he knew what to do with. Now it had all gone wrong and he was in a seedy hotel in Panama realising that the prostitute he'd just been with had stolen his wallet. Though it wasn't the money he was worried about but a sheet of folded paper, which he'd just been given by the mysterious Albert Jones: a piece of paper that might have saved his life. The search for the girl and the stolen document lead the two men deep into the Darien archipelago - a primitive, treacherous idyll that seems like Paradise but may in fact be Hell. The short novel, Darien Dogs, and the four stories that accompany it, mark the fictional debut of an assured and thrillingly gifted writer.

It has been over a decade since Henry Shukman published his award-winning first collection, In Doctor No’s Garden. Now, in his greatly anticipated second collection, he explores a little-known piece of Jewish history, in a sequence of poems that forms the centre-piece of this book. In 1917 several thousand Jewish tailors were deported from London and shipped back to Archangel and the Russian Empire they had recently fled, ostensibly to fight on the Eastern Front. They arrived just as the Revolution was unfolding and the old regime was collapsing into chaos. Among them were Shukman’s grandfather and great-uncle, and these poems chronicle their four-year struggle to return to their wives and children in London.With poems on loss and mortality, on love in difficult circumstances, and on the familiar themes of childhood and family relationships, Archangel tells the stories of many journeys – from youth to maturity, from loss back into love – and the migrations of Shukman’s Jewish grandparents are echoed in his own move with his wife and family from England to New Mexico. Whatever the theme, though, these are all love poems: poems lucid with intensity, bright with the longing for love – both its fleeting rapture and its slow contentment – and Archangel is a book of great reach, power and beauty.

**A TLS BOOK OF THE YEAR SELECTION**As heard on The Tim Ferriss Show!'Captivating'TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT'The book Shukman was born to write'NATALIE GOLDBERG, author of WRITING DOWN THE BONES'A wonderful and generous book'DAVID HINTON, author of THE WILDS OF POETRY***One Blade of Grass is award-winning novelist and poet Henry Shukman's account of his journey through the world of Zen Buddhism. Raised in a rationalist household in Oxford during the spiritual heyday of the Sixties and Seventies, an unexpected spiritual awakening would prompt a lifelong quest to integrate the experience into his life, leading him eventually to Zen Buddhism. As Shukman gets to grips with meditative practice and struggles with anxiety, depression and the chronic eczema he had had since childhoods, he discovers in surprising ways the emotional, spiritual and even physical healing that he has been searching for all along.By turns humorous and moving, this beautifully written memoir demystifies Zen training, casting its profound insights in simple, lucid language, and takes the reader on a journey of their own, into the hidden treasures of life that contemplative practice can reveal to any of us.

**A TLS BOOK OF THE YEAR SELECTION**As heard on The Tim Ferriss Show!''Captivating''TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

''The book Shukman was born to write''NATALIE GOLDBERG, author of WRITING DOWN THE BONES''A wonderful and generous book''DAVID HINTON, author of THE WILDS OF POETRY***One Blade of Grass is award-winning novelist and poet Henry Shukman''s account of his journey through the world of Zen Buddhism. Raised in a rationalist household in Oxford during the spiritual heyday of the Sixties and Seventies, an unexpected spiritual awakening would prompt a lifelong quest to integrate the experience into his life, leading him eventually to Zen Buddhism. As Shukman gets to grips with meditative practice and struggles with anxiety, depression and the chronic eczema he had had since childhoods, he discovers in surprising ways the emotional, spiritual and even physical healing that he has been searching for all along.By turns humorous and moving, this beautifully written memoir demystifies Zen training, casting its profound insights in simple, lucid language, and takes the reader on a journey of their own, into the hidden treasures of life that contemplative practice can reveal to any of us.

"Powerful, poetic, transformative."—Tara Brach, author of Radical Acceptance\"Henry Shukman is one of the wisest and most poetical teachers of dharma we have today. In an increasingly fragmented world, he is unusually good company."—Sam HarrisNew York Times bestselling author of Waking Up and host of the Making Sense podcast\\The essential meditation guide for the twenty-first century: renowned mindfulness teacher Henry Shukman replaces the concept of original sin with original love, teaching us to tap into the love that shapes our world and can transform who we are.An increasing number of people today feel disconnected, disengaged, and lonely. Many of us are seeking solace, beginning with ourselves. Original Love is the secular spiritual handbook we need to ease our troubles and find the highest possible happiness.Henry Shukman, spiritual director of Mountain Cloud Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, provides a way forward based on four paths—Mindfulness, Support, Absorption, and Awakening—that promote growth and healing through meditation for practitioners of any level. And it works! Shukman includes inspiring stories from the students of his Original Love program that reveal how it has transformed their lives.Urgently needed, Original Love helps us create peace for ourselves and our times byreducing stress, anxiety, and depression;relaxing the mind and body;easing feelings of worry, regret, anger, and irritation;and improving decision-making and executive functioning.Finding a sense of love is a critical purpose of meditation. Finding your way back to the loving peace that lives at the center of things is Original Love.

"Powerful, poetic, transformative."—Tara Brach, author of Radical Acceptance"Henry Shukman is one of the wisest and most poetical teachers of dharma we have today. In an increasingly fragmented world, he is unusually good company."—Sam HarrisNew York Times bestselling author of Waking Up and host of the Making Sense podcast, he essential meditation guide for the twenty-first century: renowned Zen master and mindfulness teacher Henry Shukman replaces the concept of original sin with original love, teaching us to tap into the love that shapes our world and can transform who we are.An increasing number of people today feel disconnected, disengaged, and lonely. Many of us are seeking solace, beginning with ourselves. Original Love is the secular spiritual handbook for inner peace we need to ease our troubles and find the highest possible happiness.Henry Shukman, spiritual director of Mountain Cloud Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, provides a way forward based on four paths—Mindfulness, Support, Absorption, and Awakening—that promote spiritual growth and healing through meditation for practitioners of any level. And it works! Shukman includes inspiring stories from the students of his Original Love program that reveal how it has transformed their lives.Urgently needed, Original Love helps us create peace for ourselves and our times byreducing stress, anxiety, and depression;relaxing the mind and body;easing feelings of worry, regret, anger, and irritation;and improving decision-making and executive functioning.Finding a sense of love is a critical purpose of meditation. Finding your way back to the loving peace that lives at the center of things is Original Love.

Jim Rogers once had everything: a successful career, the love of a beautiful woman, a Manhattan penthouse and more money than he knew what to do with. Now it had all gone wrong and he was in a seedy hotel in Panama realising that the prostitute he'd just been with had stolen his wallet. Though it wasn't the money he was worried about but a sheet of folded paper, which he'd just been given by the mysterious Albert Jones: a piece of paper that might have saved his life. The search for the girl and the stolen document lead the two men deep into the Darien archipelago - a primitive, treacherous idyll that seems like Paradise but may in fact be Hell. The short novel, Darien Dogs, and the four stories that accompany it, mark the fictional debut of an assured and thrillingly gifted writer.

In this psychologically complex and darkly humorous debut collection, awardwinning writer Henry Shukman introduces an unforgettable cast of characters, travelers whose certain paths around the world lead invariably back to the uncertain self. In “The Garden of God” an aging, ailing war reporter reflects on his adventures covering a little-known conflict in the Sahara and the precipitous and disgraced end of his career; In “Old Providence,” a dissolute artist mourns a lost love and the “bloody perfect island” where, through his own callow foolishness, he lost her. In “Darien Dogs” a man goes south to Panama, desperate for a business deal that will restore his finances and sense of mastery, only to find himself on a confounding search for a beautiful, mysterious woman and his stolen wallet. By turns full of suspense, farce and poignance, always alive with energy and atmosphere, these are the stories of a gifted and assured writer.From the Trade Paperback edition.

With this assured and powerful first collection, Henry Shukman springs fully-formed into the poetry world, having already won a raft of prizes for individual poems. His sensibility is unique, engaging and immediate; we are drawn into the worlds of these poems by his accurate eye, his sensual line and the warmth of his communion with the scene he describes. Ranging across the globe, from Mexico to Japan, from the States to Southern England, these poems can be lyrical and deeply affecting, wryly funny or wildly imaginative. From a lonely mother attempting to learn the piano to a ski-jump that never ends, from a redemptive encounter with horses on a cold day to a miraculous bowl of chicken soup, these poems display a vibrancy and variety rarely seen in contemporary poetry. But Shukman's great strength is in the domestic: the complexities of love, and the rites of passage of childhood and parenthood, are re-entered with candor, grace and originality. In Doctor No's Garden is an affectionate, refreshing debut, striking in its imagery and insight, remarkable for its lightness of touch and emotional weight.

Former foreign correspondent Charles Mortimer is all washed up, living a hand-to-mouth existence in Manhattan, wondering how things could have gone so wrong for him. A chance discovery of a newspaper obituary takes him back to the beginning of his career, when he was a young, hopeful man reporting from the Sahara Desert in the company of beautiful French photographer Celeste Dumas. The two narrowly escape death by bullet, grenade, thirst and heatstroke and, ultimately, drowning. By the end of their adventure, Mortimer has begun his life as a successful, cynical journalist. Fifteen years roll by, and Mortimer finds himself again in Algeria, where he perpetrates the great error of his professional life and realizes, finally, what it was he lost so long ago in the desert wastes.By the winner of the Author's Club First Novel Award, Guardian First Book Award and The Times First Book Award.

Jim Rogers once had everything: a successful career, the love of a beautiful woman, a Manhattan penthouse and more money than he knew what to do with. Now it had all gone wrong and he was in a seedy hotel in Panama realising that the prostitute he'd just been with had stolen his wallet. Though it wasn't the money he was worried about but a sheet of folded paper, which he'd just been given by the mysterious Albert Jones: a piece of paper that might have saved his life. The search for the girl and the stolen document lead the two men deep into the Darien archipelago - a primitive, treacherous idyll that seems like Paradise but may in fact be Hell. The short novel, Darien Dogs, and the four stories that accompany it, mark the fictional debut of an assured and thrillingly gifted writer.

It has been over a decade since Henry Shukman published his award-winning first collection, In Doctor No’s Garden. Now, in his greatly anticipated second collection, he explores a little-known piece of Jewish history, in a sequence of poems that forms the centre-piece of this book. In 1917 several thousand Jewish tailors were deported from London and shipped back to Archangel and the Russian Empire they had recently fled, ostensibly to fight on the Eastern Front. They arrived just as the Revolution was unfolding and the old regime was collapsing into chaos. Among them were Shukman’s grandfather and great-uncle, and these poems chronicle their four-year struggle to return to their wives and children in London.With poems on loss and mortality, on love in difficult circumstances, and on the familiar themes of childhood and family relationships, Archangel tells the stories of many journeys – from youth to maturity, from loss back into love – and the migrations of Shukman’s Jewish grandparents are echoed in his own move with his wife and family from England to New Mexico. Whatever the theme, though, these are all love poems: poems lucid with intensity, bright with the longing for love – both its fleeting rapture and its slow contentment – and Archangel is a book of great reach, power and beauty.

**A TLS BOOK OF THE YEAR SELECTION**As heard on The Tim Ferriss Show!'Captivating'TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT'The book Shukman was born to write'NATALIE GOLDBERG, author of WRITING DOWN THE BONES'A wonderful and generous book'DAVID HINTON, author of THE WILDS OF POETRY***One Blade of Grass is award-winning novelist and poet Henry Shukman's account of his journey through the world of Zen Buddhism. Raised in a rationalist household in Oxford during the spiritual heyday of the Sixties and Seventies, an unexpected spiritual awakening would prompt a lifelong quest to integrate the experience into his life, leading him eventually to Zen Buddhism. As Shukman gets to grips with meditative practice and struggles with anxiety, depression and the chronic eczema he had had since childhoods, he discovers in surprising ways the emotional, spiritual and even physical healing that he has been searching for all along.By turns humorous and moving, this beautifully written memoir demystifies Zen training, casting its profound insights in simple, lucid language, and takes the reader on a journey of their own, into the hidden treasures of life that contemplative practice can reveal to any of us.

**A TLS BOOK OF THE YEAR SELECTION**As heard on The Tim Ferriss Show!''Captivating''TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

''The book Shukman was born to write''NATALIE GOLDBERG, author of WRITING DOWN THE BONES''A wonderful and generous book''DAVID HINTON, author of THE WILDS OF POETRY***One Blade of Grass is award-winning novelist and poet Henry Shukman''s account of his journey through the world of Zen Buddhism. Raised in a rationalist household in Oxford during the spiritual heyday of the Sixties and Seventies, an unexpected spiritual awakening would prompt a lifelong quest to integrate the experience into his life, leading him eventually to Zen Buddhism. As Shukman gets to grips with meditative practice and struggles with anxiety, depression and the chronic eczema he had had since childhoods, he discovers in surprising ways the emotional, spiritual and even physical healing that he has been searching for all along.By turns humorous and moving, this beautifully written memoir demystifies Zen training, casting its profound insights in simple, lucid language, and takes the reader on a journey of their own, into the hidden treasures of life that contemplative practice can reveal to any of us.