In “Far From the Rooftop of the World: Travels Among Tibetan Refugees on Four Continents” (2023), Amy Yee writes about cultural identity, life in exile, and the injustices faced by Tibetans since China’s 1950 invasion and the Dalai Lama’s 1959 escape to India, where he settled in Dharamsala, home to the Tibetan government-in-exile.
With a cinematic style she moves between scenes as varied as a basketball game in Dharamsala and a young nun shot at by Chinese troops near the Nepal border, making it clear this is no dispassionate study of post-1959 Tibetan culture. “This book,” Yee writes, “is not an academic history; neither is it a memoir. It is a close-up look at the lives of ordinary Tibetans in exile who make their way in the world far from their homeland.”
An award-winning journalist and former Financial Times foreign correspondent, Yee brings both reporting rigor and a poet’s sensibility to her work.
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