Product Description

To the Last City is set deep in the Peruvian Andes, where five ill-prepared travellers - men and women with different values, temperaments and motives - find themselves trekking through one of the most exacting and beautiful regions on earth. It is a journey which may temper or destroy them. They confront not only their relationships with one another, but also the enigmas of the country's past, the dangers of its present, and the limitations of their own minds and bodies. The 'lost city' of their destination is Vilcabamba, last refuge of the Inca against the Spaniards, subsumed by jungle for four hundred years. In this brilliant exploration of the psychological challenges of travelling, set within the exotic jungle of South America, Colin Thubron for the first time joins his highly acclaimed talents as a travel writer with his gifts as a novelist.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #70390 in Books
• Published on: 2003-06-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Anita Brookner
‘Colin Thubron’s voice is unique: once heard, difficult to forget’

The Times
‘[To the Last City] is a tense, precarious achievement, brilliantly evoking a dangerous journey’

Sunday Telegraph
‘Thubron has captured, with a vividness that few could match…the charms of a journey into the unknown’

Customer Reviews

The Master in miniature
Colin Thubron's last major oeuvre was In Siberia - highly acclaimed non-fiction about one of the bleakest places on earth. Everyone wondered where he'd go next - both literally and in literary terms. To The Last City is our answer.
In this frightening novel Thubron brings fictional characters to the furthest flung Inca ruins to be found along a precipitous trail amid 'cloud forests', which he has himself taken. The travel writing side is therefore all a Thubron reader would expect - flawless - but enriched in this book by the addition of new points of view. Each of his characters sees their journey and surroundings in their own way. A fat Belgian architect indulging the whim of his doll-like wife in embarking on this 'holiday', sees the mountains as mere 'geology'(an opinion degenerating to rocks viewed as 'turds' as the party's journey becomes distinctly troubling.) Whereas an English journalist longing to do some honest writing, craves to 'possess' the magnificence around him with words. A frail Spanish Deacon, carrying in his baggage all the guilt of a Conquistador's ancestor, seeks to apologise for the savage genocide of his forebears.And for the first time, Thubron speaks through the voice of a woman - Camilla, the journalist's forty-something wife who is at a pivotal stage in her own life. Thubron's lens on the landscape zooms in and out through these different eyes, with their individual self-consciousness convincingly in place, and his own narrative - lyrical and brutal as required - drives the reader steadily forward through the 'devouring and devoured' jungle, and through history.
Central among the themes woven liana-like through To The Last City are questions about the value of writing (does it replace memory?) and why the civilisation of the Incas seems not to have favoured it as an art form at all. Death - ancient and modern - also has a starring role in the tale and sex puts in a refreshingly delicate appearance. But I don't want to give too much away. You'll want to know what happens to each of the travellers when you meet them. Held in your hands, the novel seems frustratingly slim. But this is because Thubron is an expert at elision. He's said what he wanted to say without a spare word.