Julia Todd grew up in Vermont and is a graduate of Swarthmore College and Harvard University. She lived in Nepal as a Peace Corps volunteer and has traveled widely in Asia. She has also worked as a nurse, public health planner, and owner of a rare book business specializing in Asia. Currently she focuses on writing, and on human rights issues in South Asia through work with an international organization. Julia lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband, two children, and a house full of books. This is her first novel.

Hannah, a young teacher in rural Vermont in 1880, is restless with her quiet life. When her brother―a student of the Transcendentalists in Massachusetts―is offered a college teaching job in India, Hannah defies the wishes of her family and leaves the life she knows to go with him.

In India she soon meets Sonam, an engineering student from Nepal, who has been entrusted by his father with a secret mission: to bring an ancient, gilded Buddhist manuscript—The Heart Sutra—to sacred Bodhgaya, where the Buddha became enlightened. Hannah and Sonam soon fall in love, but theirs is a forbidden romance and they must keep it hidden . . . along with the Heart Sutra. Protecting the valuable manuscript soon becomes dangerous however, and after Sonam mysteriously disappears in the mountains of Nepal, Hannah—to her dismay—finds herself in possession of the gilded manuscript and on a ship back to America, knowing she must find a way to complete Sonam’s mission. Full of adventure and romance, The Gilded Sutra is a lively story of East meets West and Transcendentalism meets Buddhism.