num_pages: 256
description: We all carry people inside our headsactors leaders writers people out of history or fiction met or unmet who sometimes seem closer to us than people we know. In The Man Within My Head  Pico Iyer sets out to unravel the mysterious closeness he has always felt with the English writer Graham Greene; he examines Greenes obsessions his elusiveness his penchant for mystery. Iyer follows Greenes trail from his first novel The Man Within  to such later classics as The Quiet American and begins to unpack all he has in common with an English public school education a lifelong restlessness and refusal to make a home anywhere a fascination with the complications of faith. The deeper Iyer plunges into their haunted kinship the more he begins to wonder whether the man within his head is not Greene but his own father or perhaps some more shadowy aspect of himself. Drawing upon experiences across the globe from Cuba to Bhutan and moving as Greene would from Sri Lanka in war to intimate moments of introspection; trying to make sense of his own past commuting between the cloisters of a fifteenth-century boarding school and California in the 1960s one of our most resourceful explorers of crossing cultures gives us his most personal and revelatory book.
language: English
title: The Man Within My Head
publisher: Knopf