John Hemming
The Girth of the Earth
The Mapmaker's Wife: A True Tale of Love, Murder and Survival in the Amazon
By Robert Whitaker
Doubleday 352pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
MY HEART SANK when I saw the titillating subtitle of this book. I guessed at once that it was about the eighteenth-century heroine Isabel Godin des Odonnais, who survived a harrowing succession of disasters on the Amazon. Her extraordinary tale was a bestseller in its day, and it has often been retold.
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