Seized by the beauty and mystery of Hieronymus Bosch's fifteenth-century Flemish masterpiece, The Garden of Delights, Terry Tempest Williams focuses her astute gaze on his medieval triptych as she would on a natural landscape. With spiritual candor, psychological immediacy, and exhilarating emotional intensity, she carries us into the world of Bosch's painting, uncovering the connections between his vision, the world it mirrors, and contemporary life.
        Approaching Paradise, Williams re-enters the terrain of childhood, where the foundations of orthodoxy are built; Hell, in all its diabolical madness, allows her to reflect on the inherent dislocations of our lives; in The Garden, moving away from the dualities of Heaven and Hell, she sees personal engagement as its own form of prayer and celebrates the possibility of a living faith right here on earth. And in Restoration, we meet two sisters, art conservators, who reveal their understanding of artistic vision.
        Leap is an unexpected pilgrimage through the landscape of a painting that continues to startle five hundred years after its creation. It is also an utterly original account of one woman's search for the place where faith, passion, and creativity converge. Finally, Leap captures the alchemical moment of imagination -- the flight from the real to the poetic.

"In this lyrical, wise, and questioning book, Terry Tempest Williams leads us in and out of the double-sided looking glass that is Bosch's Garden of Delights and of the heavens and hells of our own natural world. An innovative hybrid, woven of lived experience, visionary thinking, and critical intelligence, Leap points the way to new spiritual dimensions buried in art,'nature,' and our own lives."
-- Lucy Lippard, author of Overlay and The Lure of the Local

"Confession: I sat down, opened the book in the middle of it and of a busy day. An hour later I got up from my chair. Page after page of discovery. What a marvelous manner of handling the interlaced themes of flesh and soul. The beauty of Terry Tempest Williams's writing, her feeling, her devotion. Leap took me into the heart of Importance."
-- James Hillman, author of The Soul's Code

"Leap does what we hope literature can do -- rinse the reader's gaze, refreshing our sight and making the world new again."
-- Mark Doty, author of My Alexandria