Euphoria

In 1932, a young Englishman Andrew Bankson leads a lonely life on the Sepik River among one of the tribes of New Guinea, trying to describe and understand the foundations of life of people so different from his fellow tribesmen of the Western world. He takes his first steps in anthropology, believing himself to be a failure who is hardly destined to make a serious contribution to this new science. One day, he meets his colleagues— Nell and Fen, a married couple—who move from one wild tribe to another, gathering information. Unlike Bankson, they’ve already achieved a great deal. Fen is intelligent, energetic, full of adventurous ideas. His wife Nell is a true star of anthropology, author of a sensational scientific bestseller. For several months, Bankson, Nell, and Fen work together; they’re swept up by a real research frenzy, which will one day give way to a romantic frenzy—and they will find themselves bound by strange relationships where love, jealousy, competition, ambition, envy, and adventurism are all intertwined. The only representatives of Western civilization in the stifling jungles, they try to comprehend an incomprehensible, mysterious culture, unable to understand themselves. The book is based on the story of the famous anthropologist Margaret Mead, but in Lili King’s novel, real facts are closely woven with fiction. It is both a portrait of an extraordinary woman and a subtle, slightly ironic novel about competition, desire, and a love triangle in extreme conditions. A dramatic, intellectual, and erotic story. Lili King plays with genres effortlessly: from genuine drama to comedy, from thoughtful reflections on other cultures and ways to know them—to romance that turns into erotica.