This is just the sort of story to get a book-club debate going.

“Weird cover. Some kind of evil eye? What’s it about?”

“It’s about an American who discovered the source of the Amazon.”

“An American?”

“Yes, in 1971.”

“But surely other people had found the source long before then…”

“Well, they thought they had, but he proved them wrong.”

“Petru Popescu? Doesn’t sound very American.”

“No – that’s the name of the Romanian guy who wrote it.”

“Why didn’t the American write it?”

“Because he was worried people would think he was round the bend.”

“For claiming to have found the source?”

“No, for claiming to have had telepathic conversations with an Amerindian chief, who 'beamed’ messages into his head…”

This month's featured book follows an American who went in search of the source of the Amazon

Even without the telepathy, it’s a remarkable story. In October 1969, Loren McIntyre, an experienced photographer for National Geographic, touched down in a floatplane on the Rio Javari, one of the most tortuous tributaries of the Amazon and a border between Brazil and Peru. He’d had a tip-off that nearby he would find the Mayoruna, a tribe who had until recently been believed extinct. No sooner had he jumped ashore than his guide fell sick, apparently with malaria. McIntyre, having put him back on the plane, and arranged that the pilot would return in three days or at most a week, determined to carry on alone.

Six weeks later, a Peruvian navy flier, having seen two flashes of light from the river towards dawn, went down to investigate. He found a starving and half-naked McIntyre, his face and neck stained with tribal paint, just about afloat in a dugout canoe from which he had fired a flashgun.

In between, McIntyre had made contact with the Mayoruna – known as “cat people” for their tattooed mouths and the palm spines they jab in lips and noses – and followed a hunting party into the forest to take photos. He got separated from his camp, food and equipment, had no way of communicating that he wanted to return to them, and became a virtual prisoner as the nomads took him ever farther from where he had landed.

He got entangled in a power struggle between the chief and a young pretender. Then he had to take part in a ritual that he feared could be the prelude to mass suicide. It wasn’t; it was more bizarre still: an attempt by the Mayoruna to escape loggers, drillers and missionaries by returning to “the beginning” – to pre-Columbian times.

McIntyre – thanks to the intervention of a storm and a flood – was able to make his own escape and return to what we call “civilisation”. His appetite for exploration undiminished, he later led a three-man expedition to find the true source of the Amazon, in the snow-covered Andes of southern Peru. It wasn’t until 1987, when he met Popescu, that he talked about what he calls the “strange case of apparent thought transference” that he experienced among the Mayoruna.

"Did the Mayoruna – and McIntyre – really communicate with telepathy? Do the tribespeople have a conception of time that should make us challenge our own? You can shake your head at both questions and still find The Encounter compelling"

Did the Mayoruna – and McIntyre – really communicate with telepathy? Do the tribespeople have a conception of time that should make us challenge our own? You can shake your head at both questions and still find The Encounter compelling and thought-provoking. It is a book that suggests new ways of looking at the world and our place within it.

Popescu, a novelist and Hollywood scriptwriter, gives McIntyre’s story the narrative drive of a thriller. He alternates between third person and first, to make the most of recordings he made of McIntyre’s own accounts. Generally this works well, but now and again the first-person, present-tense voice is a little too writerly for the rawness of the jungle.

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McIntyre (who died in 2003), far from being round the bend, emerges as a man imbued with “the healthy old Scottish conviction that whatever exists in this world must be both real and concrete”. But he was a man, too, who had a great empathy with tribal peoples, and who was open to rediscovery and re-evaluation.

This new edition of the book, which was first published in Britain in 1991, has been issued to coincide with a touring production of The Encounter, directed and performed by Simon McBurney, founder of the theatre company Complicite, which is currently at the Barbican in London and due to open in Manchester next month. McBurney first presented the show at the Edinburgh International Festival last August, somehow managing, with a soundscape recorded on the Amazon and relayed via headsets, to transport his audience to the jungle. Dominic Cavendish of The Daily Telegraph described the experience as “head-turning” and “spellbinding”.

The Encounter: Amazon Beaming by Petru Popescu (Pushkin Press, £9.99) is available from Telegraph Books (0844 871 1514; books.telegraph.co.uk) at £9.99 plus p&p.

Incarnations: India in 50 Lives by Sunil Khilnani (Allen Lane, £30)



The first part of a BBC radio series based on this book was broadcast from May last year, when Gillian Reynolds, reviewing it in The Daily Telegraph, said it “makes the mind fly across time, place and history”. It’s the story of the country told through the lives of 50 significant figures, from the Buddha to a self-made billionaire, and spans 2,500 years.What makes it compelling, in print as well as on the airwaves, is that Professor Khilnani — director of the India Institute at King’s College, London — doesn’t merely burrow into the archives; he travels to ancient forts and ayurvedic call centres, to slum temples and think tanks, to tease out connections between past and present and to show, as he puts it, “how the afterlives of historical figures” are being used, by everyone from tribal leaders to entrepreneurs, in the India of today. It’s a book that could be read with profit by any visitors to India, even those who think they know the country well. It’s scholarly and playful at the same time: we’re told that Ashoka, an emperor who came to power when the Romans were fighting Carthage, was “unprepossessing — a bit of a lens-breaker, as they say in Bollywood”.The second half of the series can be heard on Radio 4 from February 28 for six weeks.

Holi celebrations in India

Incarnations: India in 50 Lives by Sunil Khilnani (Allen Lane, £30) is available from Telegraph Books (0844 871 1514; books.telegraph.co.uk) at £25 plus p&p.

The Outrun by Amy Liptrot (Canongate, £14.99)



This remarkable debut has been reviewed in The Sunday Telegraph, which is why I’m mentioning it only briefly. It’s a memoir of addiction and recovery, and the role played in the latter by nature and writing. Hardly a conventional travel book, then, but it’s powerfully evocative of Orkney, “where land is often just a thin division between sky and water”.

Mainland, Orkney

The Outrun by Amy Liptrot (Canongate, £14.99) is available from Telegraph Books (0844 871 1514; books.telegraph.co.uk) at £12.99 plus p&p.

Bookmarks

The Empty Quarter, Richard Taylor’s film of Wilfred Thesiger’s crossing of the region, will be screened by the Travellers’ Film Club at the Piccadilly branch of Waterstone’s in London on March 9, with an introduction by the director’s son, Richard (places free; telephone 020 7851 or email piccadilly@waterstones.com).

Speakers at Aye Write!, in Glasgow (March 10-20; ayewrite.com), will include Bee Rowlatt, author of In Search of Mary, talking about her travels in the footsteps of the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft; and Amy Liptrot, author of The Outrun, and Dan Boothy, author of Island of Dreams, discussing their memoirs of island life on, respectively, Orkney and Eilean Bàn.

Istanbul

Two writers who have made much use of Istanbul as a setting, Elif Shafak (whose The Architect’s Apprentice was shortlisted for last year’s Ondaatje Prize) and Jason Goodwin (who has featured the city in travels books and his novels about the Ottoman detective Yashim), will join Barnaby Rogerson of Eland, the travel classics publisher, at the Daunt Books Festival in London (March 11; dauntbooks.co.uk).

Kathleen Jamie, joint winner of the 2013 Dolman Travel Book Award for Sightlines, a series of essays about the natural world, and William Atkins, author of The Moor, a travel narrative and cultural history of the English moors, will be speaking about “Writing and the natural world” at the York Literature Festival (March 11;yorkliteraturefestival.co.uk).

Edward Wilson-Lee, author of Shakespeare in Swahililand, a combination of travelogue and cultural history, will be speaking at Stanfords bookshop in London on March 15 (bit.ly/1Lgxnnw) about his journeys to explore the Bard’s influence in East Africa.

The motorcycle helmet and the hijab will both feature in a talk by Lois Pryce, co-founder of the Adventure Travel Film Festival, on March 16 at the University of Bristol about her two solo bike tours of Iran (bit.ly/1LgAkVp).

Nick Middleton, author of An Atlas of Countries That Don’t Exist (because they lack diplomatic recognition or UN membership) will be speaking about Atlantium, Christiania and other oddities at Nantwich Book Shop, Cheshire, on March 23 (bit.ly/1msv6PM).