The Riverbones

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Tags: books, centenary-edition, environment, UQP

Not many people would swim through a river populated with piranhas while researching their first book, but Andrew Westoll isn’t your typical author.

Click here to read an exclusive extract from The Riverbones

The Canadian journalist travelled to South America to pen The Riverbones, and was one of the featured speakers at the 2009 Brisbane Writers Festival.

The book traces Mr Westoll’s love affair with Suriname, a tiny country in South America that has the largest tract of pristine rainforest on earth and was his home for a year while researching capuchin monkeys in 2001.

After returning to Canada he couldn’t shake his experiences, and decided to enrol in postgraduate studies in creative writing at the University of British Columbia.

The book gives readers an insight into the former Dutch colony, its local inhabitants the Maroon people, and the scars remaining from civil unrest that shook the country in the 1980s.

Woven through the narrative is the hunt for the bright-blue okopipi frog – an extremely rare species that lives only in Suriname.

Mr Westoll said he hoped The Riverbones was a rollicking read that showed the importance of preserving what’s left of our planet.

“First, I hope readers enjoy the adventure. Second, I hope my book can somehow serve as a testament to Surinamese Maroon culture, a wake-up call for the Surinamese government to begin living up to the human rights treaties it signed long ago,” Mr Westoll said.

“But if nothing else, I’d like readers to learn and perhaps fall in love, as I did, with Suriname itself, a remarkable little land of rivers and jungles and monkeys and tiny blue frogs just north of the Amazon that may represent our last chance to save what remains of South America’s once-sprawling rainforest.”

By Cameron Pegg

The Riverbones, UQP, RRP $34.95

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