THE FOLIO SOCIETY

Like his great 19th-century predecessors, Redmond O'Hanlon is possessed of that particular brand of courage, passion and madness that sends well-educated and well-mannered Englishmen abroad in search of the world's more inaccessible flora and fauna.

Having already spent two months travelling through the primary rainforests of Borneo, he thought that a 4-month journey through the Venezuelan Amazonas would pose no particular problem. After all, he knew some of the dangers at first-hand - blackwater and dengue fevers, malaria, cholera and the fearsome Chagas' disease. Prowling jaguars could kill you with one bite to the head - but only in exceptional circumstances - and piranha will rip you to bits - but only if you are already bleeding.

However, when O'Hanlon embarks on an adventure, things are apt to go spectacularly wrong. Getting lost in seriously dangerous places, kissing deadly snakes, surviving on jungle delicacies like turtle brains and armadillo risotto, and coming face to face with the Yanomami (reputedly 'the most violent people on earth'), O'Hanlon journeys into a heart of darkness that is at once terrifying and utterly hilarious.

Bill Bryson’s Desert Island Companion.
‘You find yourself racing through the pages, not simply because the writing is so impossibly entertaining and engrossing, but because you are becoming genuinely concerned about this crazy, likeable, hopelessly optimistic Englishman plunging ever deeper into seriously dangerous conditions, without the least hope of easy extrication. Redmond O’Hanlon is the nicest, funniest man in the world, and In Trouble Again is, in my view, the best travel book of the twentieth century. If you have not read it before, you are about to become a very lucky person.’