"A Step Away from Paradise tells the story of Tibet's Tulshuk Lingpa; a visionary lama who in 1962 launched an expedition to what he and his followers believed to be the land of immortality described in twelfth-century Tibetan tradition. With over 300 disciples; he ventured up a remote Himalayan mountain at the Nepal-Sikkim border in order to ‘open the way' to a hidden land of plenty found on no map. Fifty years later; Thomas K. Shor tracks down the surviving members of this visionary expedition and entwines their remarkable stories of faith and adventure with his own quest to discover the reality of this land known as Beyul. What emerges is a breathtaking story alive with possibility; bringing the reader as close to the Hidden Land as a book possibly can. As the astounding account unfolds; the reader is sure to repeat the question constantly raised by the author in his interviews: And then what happened? The story recalls and evokes one of humanity's oldest aspirations—that of finding a stairway to paradise"