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From the dust jacket: Pico Iyer has for many years described with keen perception and exacting wit the shifting textures of faraway lands anchored on a spinning globe that mixes and matches East and West. Now he casts a philosophical eye upon this curious state of flatness.

In the transitional village that our world has become, travel and technology fuel each other and us. As Iyer points out, everywhere is so made up of everywhere else, and our very should have been put into circulation. Yet even global beings need a home.

Using his own multicultural upbringing (Indian, American, British) as a point of department, Iyer sets out on a quest, both physical and psychological, to find what remains constant in a world gone mobile. He begins in Los Angeles International Airport, where town life - shops, services, sociability - is available without a town, and in Hong Kong, where people actually live in self-contained hotels. He moves on to Toronto, which has been given new life and a new literature by its immigrant population, and to Atlanta where the Olympic Village inadvertently commemorates the corporate universalism that is the Olympics' secret face. And finally, he returns to England, where the effects of empire-as-global village are still being sorted out, and to Japan, where in the midst of alien surfaces, Iyer unexpectedly finds a home.

As a guide to far-flung places, Pico Iyer can hardly be surpassed.