To the Last City

Five travellers set out through the Peruvian Andes and cloud forest in search of Vilcabamba, the remote refuge where an Inca state survived after the Spanish conquest of Cuzco. They are poorly prepared for the demands of the terrain and bring different motives, rivalries and private expectations to the expedition. As the route becomes harder, the romantic idea of a lost city gives way to exhaustion, dependence and conflict within the group.

Vilcabamba’s history gives the modern journey its deeper pressure. The site was the centre of Neo-Inca resistance until the Spanish destroyed the independent state in 1572, and the expedition repeatedly confronts the distance between imagined discovery and a landscape already shaped by conquest and Indigenous memory. The novel uses the search for the last Inca stronghold to explore obsession, cultural projection and the strains that travel places on unstable relationships.