Half a World Away: Book Release April 30!
Take a deep breath and step into Half a World Away, a unique coming-of-age memoir of a 10-and-11-year-old boy during his nine-month trip across the globe in 1962 and 1963.
In vivid journal entries enriched by deep memory, Jonathan A. Wright describes the beauty in other cultures but also injustice and inequality, and it changes him.
Immerse yourself in the streets of postwar London, feel the ruins of ancient Rome and Greece come alive, and look down into an excavation in Byblos, Lebanon and see, through Jonny’s eyes, 4000 years of history.
From the artists’ stalls of Montmartre to the cave temples of India, from the soaring silence of the Himalayan foothills to the chaotic canals of Bangkok, see what he saw, through the family camera and in his voice. We hear that voice evolve and grow through his journal entries, expanded by recovered memory and refreshed insight. The reader may also have their first up-close experience of snake charming and levitation.
Experience a cold dark evening as the only Westerners at a riverside barbecue with Mongolian refugees in Taipei, an earthquake in Tokyo, and a hike above the tree line through snow squalls in shorts and sweaters above Nikko, Japan. The book explores the author’s awakening to privilege and inequity in some of its extremes and begins him on a lifelong commitment to justice and advocacy.
With tutor Christopher Lydon, Jonny’s brother Duncan and their parents Mary and Arthur, the adventure of a lifetime unfolds in Jonny’s own words, revealing a time and circumstance impossible to repeat. Imagine and begin!
Half a World Away (Brook Hollow Press, 2026) is his first memoir.
What others say about Half a World Away:
With innocence of young eyes and with the perspective of a long life well-lived, Wright gives us this sweet, loving memoir full of the wonder and mystery that is our world. Bravo!
— Ken Burns, filmmaker
Sixty years later, Jonny Wright’s magical eyes of boyhood have recreated his own “grand tour” of the world, with his family (and me!) in the early 1960s. And what a time it was — post-war, but before we Americans acquired a taste for imperialism. You might imagine dear Jonny as a 10-year-old Henry James, with flashes of Mark Twain’s bite in The Innocents Abroad. For 21st Century readers, there’s an enchanting round-the-world memoir of a vanished world that could very well break your heart.
–Christopher Lydon, Open Source
Half a World Away is available at Western Massachusetts bookstores, through the Jonathan Arthur Wright Amazon author’s page, direct from Ingram Sparks on-demand paperback and digital, and on Amazon Kindle, all as of April 30, 2026.
