Editorial Reviews  
Amazon.com  
As a teacher of English literature, Jamie Zeppa would understand how the story of her journey into Bhutan could be fit into the convenient box of "coming-of-age romance," a romance with a landscape, a people, a religion, and a dark, irresistible student. An innocent, young Catholic woman from a Canadian mining town who had "never been anywhere," Zeppa signed up for a two-year stint teaching in a remote corner of the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan. Despite the initial shock of material privation and such minor inconveniences as giardia, boils, and leeches, Zeppa felt herself growing into the vast spaces of simplicity that opened up beyond the clutter of modern life. Alongside her burgeoning enchantment, a parallel realization that all was not right in Shangri-La arose, especially after her transfer to a college campus charged with the politics of ethnic division. Still she maintained her center by devouring the library's Buddhist tracts and persevering in an increasingly fruitful meditation practice. When the time came for her to leave, she had undergone a personal transformation and found herself caught between two worlds that were incompatible and mutually incomprehensible. Zeppa's candid, witty account is a spiritual memoir, a travel diary, and, more than anything, a romance that retraces the vicissitudes of ineluctable passion. --Brian Bruya 

Book Description  
In the tradition of Iron and Silk and Bicycle Days, comes the story of a young woman's self-discovery in a foreign land. At the age of twenty-two, Jamie Zeppa, raised in a small Canadian town by her grandparents, engaged to be married, never having left the North American continent, decided to embark on one great adventure before settling down for a happy, if conventional, life. She sought a place at the outer reaches of the globe and the outer limits of her imagination and ended up in Bhutan, a tiny Buddhist kingdom closed to the West for centuries, an ... 

The publisher, Riverhead Books , April 9, 1999 
Advance praise for "Beyond the Sky and the Earth"  
“I am almost afraid to talk about how much I loved this book, as, when I returned from my own life-changing journey to Bhutan, I was almost afraid to talk about that. Praise Jamie Zeppa for putting language to a landscape that is beautiful beyond description. Praise her for her courage, honesty, and mindfulness in finding words for an experience that goes beyond words.” -- Pam Houston, author of Cowboys Are My Weakness and Waltzing the Cat. “Beyond the Sky and the Earth is a joy, a gift. Jamie Zeppa has made of her journey to Bhutan another journey, this one ...