THE MAPMAKER S WIFE

In the 1740s, a young scientist named Jean Godin traveled from France to Peru--a French colony in those days--as part of a project to map the earth and measure its size. There he met and married a teenage bride, Isabel Gramesón, hoping to take her back to France with him. In order to get permission to do so, he left Isabel behind and trekked across the continent to confer with the colonial authorities--who promptly forbade him to return, because Isabel''s part of Peru was under Spanish rule. Twenty years later, Isabel herself set out to find her husband on a perilous journey that culminated in a long sojourn, alone, in the rain forest as she tried to survive. This dramatic true story is told against the backdrop of early scientific inquiry as well as the tortured history of colonialism in South America.