Peru · Literary fiction
At Play in the Fields of the Lord
In the Amazon rainforest, missionaries, outsiders and an Indigenous community become entangled in a struggle over belief, power and survival. Matthiessen makes the forest an overwhelming presence, challenging the ambitions of people who arrive convinced they know what others need. Encounters expose the distance between good intentions and their consequences, while competing visions of civilisation threaten a world they barely understand. Its sense of place comes from the tension between the living complexity of the rainforest and the simplifications imposed upon it.
Amazon rainforest