A true journey · India to Jerusalem · 2016–2018

He set out across the world to prove God doesn't exist. He should have known better than to look for him.

Two years. Twenty-seven faiths. One question — asked in ashrams, fire temples, hermit caves and interrogation rooms, until the answer found him first.

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PHOTOGRAPH FROM THE ACTUAL JOURNEY — LEBANON, 2018
The premise

Some men run from God.
Noah went looking — armed.

At seventeen, Noah lost his faith the night his father's fighter jet went down off the coast of Pakistan. At twenty-three — a degree in mathematics, a brilliant future, and six years of insomnia later — he boards a boat to India with a single mission: to hear out every religion on Earth, from the ones who live them, and prove them all wrong. To heal at last — or die trying.

From the slums of Chennai to a Himalayan kingdom that measures happiness by decree, from the eternal fire of Yazd to the interrogation rooms of Iran's holy city, from a hermit's cave in Lebanon to the Wailing Wall — Noah collects sages, frauds, martyrs and mystics. And the trail of a young Frenchwoman who crosses his path one New Year's Eve on the Ganges, and keeps reappearing, one whispered word at a time.

« Jerusalem. December 31st. »
19months on the road
13countries & territories
27faiths, heard from within
100sof real conversations
1question
The journey

Every mile of it happened.

The novel follows the exact route the author travelled — drawn here from the real coordinates, from the fish docks of Chennai to the Holy Sepulchre.

CHENNAI · SEPT. 2016VARANASISIKKIM · BHUTANKATHMANDUYAZD · AUG. 2017TEHRANQADISHA · BEIRUTHEBRON JERUSALEM · MARCH 2018
HINDUISM · BUDDHISM · ZOROASTRIANISM · SHIA & SUNNI ISLAM · SUFISM · DRUZE · MARONITE & ORTHODOX CHRISTIANITY · JUDAISM · AND WHAT WAS WAITING AT THE END

The Call of the Road

Friday, September 2nd, 2016 — Chennai, India.

The smell reached him before the dock did. Fresh fish sold at auction, overpowered by the denser reek of yesterday's unsold catch drying in the sun. Scrawny cats feasted between the stalls, waved off without conviction by fishermen worn hollow from their night at sea.

He lit a cigarette. Standing among the stalls, he asked himself, once again, what exactly he had come here to find. It was vague, ungraspable — like the smoke, like the smell of fish, like the din of the merchants.

He was twenty-three years old, and he had not truly slept in six. Every night, he went down with his father into the dark water. Every morning, he surfaced alone.

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How it works

Three chapters. Nine days. Then you decide.

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Chapter one arrives immediately — the crash, the empty coffin, the boat to India.

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Who is Denys de Bonneval?

A French engineer who spent ten years studying the world's religions, then two years walking through them — hundreds of conversations across twenty-seven traditions, from untouchable slums to forbidden fire temples. He writes under a pen name, for the same reason he travelled: so the question would stay bigger than the man asking it.

Begin the journey

What he set out to bury keeps refusing to stay dead.

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छिपा हुआ ईश्वर خدای پنهان אֵל מִסְתַּתֵּר Deus absconditus