•  A critic of the Taliban government that seized control of his homeland, Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai was forced to make a home for his family in Quetta, Pakistan. But after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on U.S. soil, Karzai decided the time was right to wrest his country back from the Taliban. He shares with TIME his perilous journey home, concluding with his inauguration as President.

•  Mohsin Hamid, author of Moth Smoke, knew it would be difficult to return to Lahore so soon after moving to London but admits the experience changed him for the better. "Somehow it grounded me, and rather than feeling torn between London and Lahore, I came back feeling more at home inside myself." Hamid plans to finish his new novel, set in New York, next year.

•  Blinded by cerebrospinal meningitis at the age of three, Ved Mehta has surmounted incalculable odds to document his visit home to Lahore, which his family was forced to flee during the partition of Pakistan from India. The author of 24 books, Mehta wrote his first memoir, Face to Face, in 1957. His next book, The Red Letters, will be released in 2004.

•  Author of The Romantics: A Novel, Pankaj Mishra calls a small village, miles from his birthplace of Jhansi, home. "The place, being remote and small," Mishra explains, "allowed me to embrace the illusions of continuity and permanence, which hardly any of our improvised homes offer anymore." Mishra's new book on the Buddha will be published next year.

•  A resident of Canada, native Sri Lankan Shyam Selvadurai, says he was so consumed with writing of his return home that "I would sometimes look up from my computer, out of my Toronto study, and feel an odd disorientation." Selvadurai wrote Funny Boy and Cinnamon Gardens. His next novel, tentatively titled The Book of Chairs, is set in Sri Lanka.

•  "Contributing to this issue," says Wendy Law-Yone, who was born in Mandalay, Burma, "has allowed me to confront exile—a pervasive theme in all my writings—in a more direct way than my fiction permits." Law-Yone's novels, The Coffin Tree and Irrawaddy Tango, have just been reissued in paperback. Her new book, Worlds Without End, will appear in 2005.

•  Vietnamese-American Monique Truong, author of this year's The Book of Salt, battled while writing her essay for TIME with the question of why she hadn't returned to Vietnam sooner. With the project behind her, Truong admits, "The anxiety for me now is, what if I had returned to Vietnam and found that I did not belong there?" Her next book is set in the American South.

•  American Peter Hessler, who authored River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, enjoyed journeying back to the Chongqing region, where he taught English as a Peace Corps volunteer from 1996 to 1998. "It's a reminder," Hessler says, "that in the end the writing is a relatively small part of why I care about Fuling and why I often return." Hessler is now working on his second book.

•  "Each trip back to Japan allows me to gauge either how far I have come or how far I have fallen," says Karl Taro Greenfeld. "Living in Japan may have been when I was happiest." This Japanese-American author returned to his birthplace to visit his sick grandmother. Greenfeld wrote Speed Tribes and last year's Standard Deviations. He is also the editor of TIME Asia.

•  "No journey is more essential," says Pico Iyer, author of The Global Soul, a book about the new nomadic being, "than the one that takes us back to what we regard as our foundations." A longtime contributor to TIME, the California native who calls Kyoto home has written several travelogues including Video Night in Kathmandu. Sun After Dark, his next book, will be out in April 2004.

•  "Where my relatives live (far from me, in my natal land) is significant," says Korean-American Chang-rae Lee, who traveled to Seoul to visit his extended family for this issue. "But I did begin to think that 'place' mattered less than our blood bonds." Lee has written two novels, Native Speaker and A Gesture Life. His new novel, Aloft, is due out next March.

•  "When I started writing about my journeys home for the TIME project, a flood of images and memories were unleashed," says the author of Red Dust, Ma Jian. "Finishing the piece, I realized there is perhaps something more important to me than freedom and security, and that is a sense of belonging." Ma's next novel, The Noodle Maker, will be out January 2004.

•  Born in New York State to immigrant Chinese parents, Gish Jen wrote of her travels in Beijing, a trip which allowed her to ponder the role culture has played in molding her identity. Jen has penned two novels, Typical American and Mona in the Promised Land, and is working on a new novel, titled The Love Wife, which will be released fall 2004.

•  For his past work, such as I do I do I do and The Chain, photographer Chien-Chi Chang focused his lens on the ties that bind a person to others and to a society. Using the same concept for this project, Chang traveled back to his home village of Wuri. His other photos will be on display at the First International Center of Photography Triennial in New York City next month.

•  Jessica Hagedorn, the author of The Gangster of Love and Dogeaters, was thrilled to explore why the Philippines, her first home, frequently serves as her "artistic muse." "'Home' for me is a loaded word," says Hagedorn. "It's not just a physical place but a suitcase of memories, which I carry around with me." Hagedorn's latest novel, Dream Jungle, is due out imminently.