Natasha Pulley

press release: From Natasha Pulley comes a story of a great friendship and a treacherous quest in the magical landscape of nineteenth-century Peru. In 1859, ex-East India Company opium smuggler Merrick Tremayne is nursing an injury that almost cost him his leg, trapped at his crumbling family estate in Cornwall. In the sprawling grounds of the old house, something is wrong; a statue moves, his grandfather’s pines explode, and his brother accuses him of madness. So when the India Office asks Merrick to smuggle cuttings from cinchona trees—the source of quinine, essential for the treatment of malaria—from deep within Peru, he knows it’s a terrible idea. The terrain is treacherous and a gang of criminals runs the quinine supply, and nearly every able-bodied expeditionary who’s made the attempt has died. Merrick can barely walk. But against his better judgment, he joins the expedition to the last outpost before the quinine woods: a tiny mission colony on the edge of the Amazon where a salt line on the ground separates town from forest. Anyone who crosses is killed by something that watches from the trees, but somewhere beyond the salt are cinchona, and the way around is blocked.