Book of the Month: The Lost City, by Henry Shukman

For a certain kind of traveler, the Indiana Jones fantasy is irresistible: You machete through tangled jungle vines and stumble upon an overgrown passageway; plunging through clawing underbrush, you emerge to see an intact stone city of elaborate temples and plazas. Truth supports the fantasy: Many explorers are convinced that South and Central America's jungles contain ancient cities. More Machu Picchus and Tikals await.

The Lost City, Henry Shukman's powerful new novel, is founded on this tantalizing premise. Jackson Small, the protagonist, became interested in South American ruins when based with the British army in Belize. His passion was fanned on forays with his closest comrade, Connelly, who was subsequently killed in a skirmish with guerillas. Connelly claimed to have glimpsed a vast, ruined city in a little-explored region of the Peruvian highlands, and after leaving the army, Small vows to find the lost city.

On the way, he encounters bandits, bureaucrats, revolutionaries, a kindly cleric, a hippie expat, corrupt officials, and a drug lord who reigns over the area where the lost city is reputed to be. He also falls in love with an enchanting and almost equally intrepid American graduate student, and befriends a mysterious highlands boy, both of whom become his companions.

Shukman convincingly portrays the humid, coastal backwater where Small's odyssey begins to take shape, but the book really soars when he journeys into the tumbledown Peruvian mountain towns, with their market stalls, dusty plazas, and terracotta roofs—and it reaches an epiphanic intensity when Small ventures into the cloud forest and stumbles on his own lost city, with unanticipated consequences.

Braiding power, commerce, archaeology, and tourism with threads of adventure and romance, Shukman weaves a compelling narrative. But his greatest triumph is rendering an almost impossibly remote region so present and palpable. With poetic precision, Shukman conjures the cloud forest to life, so that even now, long after putting the book down, I still wander among the creepers, condors, and gray ossified mists of highland Peru.