Green Mansions: A Romance of the Tropical Forest
1904
A failed revolutionary flees political turmoil in Venezuela for the untouched depths of the Guayana forest. There he discovers Rima, the last survivor of a vanished aboriginal tribe - a wild, bird-like girl raised among the creatures of the green mansions. What unfolds is a love story both tender and doomed, as Abel's longing for the pristine wilderness and the luminous Rima collides with the inescapable violence of the outside world he carries with him. Hudson renders the tropical landscape itself as a living presence, his prose weaving together lyrical natural history with an aching meditation on what it means to be the last of something - a people, a way of life, an unblemished world. The novel carries the weight of impending loss, an elegy for wilderness and for the innocent collision between civilization and the wild.
