Caballito

Book excerpt: Max is a young lecturer in anthropology who always saw himself living in the jungle studying never-before-contacted tribes, but at every step he has been thwarted. One day in a second-hand bookshop he discovers a couple of handwritten pages stuck in a book. They seem to have been written by a Victorian adventuress who really had once lived with an unknown tribe in the Amazon. Determined to discover more, Max is dragged into a world of mysterious suicides, pagan sects, child prostitution and police harassment. But as he uncovers fabulous stories of intrepid women following their dreams he also finds love with a talented young photographer desperate to know who she really is. As cultures and moralities collide Max finally gets to live in the Amazon - though not for the reasons he would have wished.CABALLITO is much more than a mystery story about identity, detection and the pursuit of dreams. It is also a vision of an alternative society, one in which there is no such thing as fatherhood, where childhood innocence has no meaning, and where communities openly share everything including each other. Once upon a time it was how all people lived - and a few still do. Baker (author of the modern classic in evolutionary biology SPERM WARS) infuses CABALLITO as he did his previous novel PRIMAL with all his acknowledged expertise on human sexual psychology and behavior.