Lost Horizon

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Shangri-La promises peace, beauty and long life. But first its visitors must give up the world they knew.

The gripping adventure that invented the mystery of Shangri-La.

During an evacuation from Baskul, a light aircraft is hijacked and flown deep into the high Tibetan Himalayas. Among the passengers is Conway, a talented British consul, accompanied by the anxious Mallinson, the adaptable Barnard and the missionary Miss Brinklow.

Their flight ends near a hidden lamasery in a remote valley: Shangri-La, a place of peace, beauty, learning and unsettling restraint. Are they guests or prisoners? Can they leave? And do they want to?

Lost Horizon is a classic adventure novel about utopia, exile, civilisation and the longing to step outside ordinary time. Framed as a mystery and set between British India, Tibet and China, James Hilton’s novel combines lost-world adventure with philosophical fantasy.

From the author of Goodbye Mr Chips, Lost Horizon is the classic adventure that introduced Shangri-La, a hidden paradise whose peace and beauty conceal a deeper mystery.

Hilton's premise strikes a deep chord in today's 'everything is relative' society. His utopia retains all its charm and, in his creation of Shangri-La, he added something permanently to the language
Guardian

About James Hilton

James Hilton was born in Lancashire in 1900, the son of a headmaster. His best known books, Lost Horizon and Goodbye Mr Chips, were written during the thirties, a period which afforded him great commercial success and enormous popularity. Lost Horizon was made into a blockbuster Hollywood film in 1937. For a time, Hilton was highest paid screen-writer in Hollywood and he won an Academy Award in 1942 for his work on the screenplay of Mrs. Miniver. Hilton continued to write novels throughout his career. He died in 1954.

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Details

Imprint: Vintage Digital
Published: 04/06/2015
ISBN: 9781473520301
Length: 224 pages
Price: £2.99

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Paperback 2015
Ebook 2015

Lost Horizon

Format:

Buy the book from:

Hilton's premise strikes a deep chord in today's 'everything is relative' society. His utopia retains all its charm and, in his creation of Shangri-La, he added something permanently to the language

Lost Horizon introduced the world to a Tibetan paradise where people live extraordinarily long lives of peace, harmony and wisdom. Expertly plotted and deftly written, Hilton's book suggests mysteries without spelling them out - and leaves us wanting more

James Hilton invented the name Shangri-La for a paradise on earth in a book that captured the imagination of a public dealing with financial hardships and the threat of Nazism

More than 60 years after James Hilton wrote Lost Horizon, launching one of the century's most enduring literary mysteries, the search for paradise on earth has led to the mountains of south-west China… Hilton intended it as a pacifist parable; Hollywood turned it into a romantic blockbuster

The important thing to note about this very fine novel - the tale of an adventure in Tibet - is that it is unusual and the product of a first-class mind...a wildly exciting story, nightmare, fantasy, or what you will

A charm both of poetry and of strangeness... It is absorbing, a book one will re-read

Hilton (1900-1954) is part of the vast company of largely forgotten good authors... He produced a small handful of excellent popular novels - Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Random Harvest - but nothing more enduring than the one that gave us Shangri-La: Lost Horizon

The word [Shangri-La] has become part of the English language, the name of retirement bungalows from Devon to Durban; of hotels and boarding houses promising rest and seclusion in every continent

About James Hilton

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