Here is the synopsis of my novel:

The novel is called River Spirits, an Amazonian Fantasy. It's the story of a young American mariner who arrives in Brazilian Amazonia in mysterious circumstances (resolved at the end), and the strange experiences he has there as he moves restlessly from one Amazonian milieu to the next, encountering foreign environmentalists, gold miners, Indians, anthropologists, missionaries and caboclos, the part-Indian people who inhabit the forests, villages and towns of Amazonia.

Guaranteed to contain the following: (a) an upbeat ending; (b) 50,000 words. It's short, but that's because I have followed Elmore Leonard's advice that when writing a novel you should leave out the parts that readers tend to skip. It's all good bits.

Guaranteed not to contain the following: the word rainforest. Not even once. To me this is a preachy word that would be deadening in a novel: it promises a raft of pre-formed, received ideas to do with ecological science and politics. While these ideas are fine, and serious, they are not much fun in a novel. To use Sam Goldwyn's maxim: “If you want to send a message, call Western Union.”

My intention here was to give the reader a picture of Amazonia that was new and surprising. One of the ways I sought to do this was to avoid any pretence that I was offering a last word on this region, that I could speak about it as a whole. In the English language there are a lot of books about Amazonia, and few of them are any good in my opinion because too many of them attempt to address the reader from on high, with an all-encompassing authority – which is impossible. The best books – and I have read dozens – are limited and specific in their subject matter.

I have certainly never read a good novel about Amazonia, and this book is my attempt to fill that gap. It's my attempt at the kind of novel about Amazonia that I would like to read myself, based on my experience as a (kind of) travel writer and as a student of non-western cultures. The kind of novel I like evokes an intense experience of strangeness and a strong and vivid sense of geographical and cultural setting.

The main character is deliberately left undescribed in many usual ways. He has little or no back story. I thought that left more to the imagination and also enabled him to serve as something like a pair of virtual reality goggles through which the reader experiences the story as directly as possible.

May contain nuts.

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