Paul Theroux’s new novel finds Slade Steadman, the 50-year-old author of a celebrated travel book, on the trail to darkest Ecuador in the company of some deeply unpleasant American tourists and his disillusioned doctor girlfriend Ava. The object of his quest is a rare hallucinogen, shyly administered by the local shaman, with which our man hopes to end his long-standing writer’s block and get his professional life back on track. Equally irksome is a second blockage: ‘The sexual desire he had once described in starved paragraphs of solitude … as something akin to cannibal hunger was something he had not tasted for a long time.’

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