Long ago (1979) and far away (New Jersey, where I was then living) I began writing a novel, a sequel to James Hilton’s Lost Horizon. I was wild about Hilton’s book, re-reading it often, feeling in my bones that this is a book about something real. But Lost Horizon was written in 1932, before the atomic bomb and before the invasion by Communist China in 1950 and again, more devastatingly, in 1959. I couldn’t stand the thought of the lamasery at Shangri-la in Red hands. I tried to think, how could it survive behind the lines, so to speak. (more…)