A retelling of a story that was once front-page news across the world: the disappearance of probably the last of the “gentleman explorers”, Percy Harrison Fawcett, his son, and his friend in the Xingu river basin in 1925.

Grann mixes the history – both of Fawcett and of some of the Fawcett-hunters who’ve emerged over the decades – with his own archival research and explorations around the Xingu. He shows how Fawcett’s obsession within finding the lost city of Z (as he called it) led him to falsify the information he gave to others about his intended route. He also traces the growth of the obsession, setting Fawcett’s undoubted skills in the jungle with his demanding and unforgiving manner and his gradual eclipse by other, more professional, anthropologists and archaeologists, who decided his ideas about the Amazon being able to support a large civilisation were fatally flawed.

And yet the professionals may have been wrong in their criticisms. A new generation now argues that there might have been exactly such a civilisation, building cities in wood and cultivating large tracts of jungle. Disease wiped them out leaving only subtle traces, such as the earthworks now being re-discovered.

The story trails-off a little at the end, which is perhaps inevitable given that there’s been no proper resolution of the disappearance. It’s still a great story, of a time not long past when there remained significant gaps on the map.

5/5. Finished Tuesday 5 October, 2021.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)