Meet Daniel Cooper, a young American searching for a way to escape the predictability of life in the United States. Lured by wanderlust, Daniel travels to the Amazonian village of Los Puentes Caidos - a seductive hamlet of magical realities where human nature, Mother Nature, and the nature of truth converge in tropical excess.

There, old Santiago, a philosophic seeker, has formed his Drinking and Thinking Club. This curious "Thinkery" includes a skeptical war veteran, a noble dwarf, a far-seeing blind man, and assorted other questioners who spend their time drinking beer, sucking lemons, and reflecting - quite imaginatively and often amusingly - on the nature of freedom, truth, death, and women. Daniel joins this club hoping to reclaim both his lost soul and Santiago's devastatingly beautiful and mysterious daughter, Angelina. But Daniel is up against stiff competition in the likes of Hector Tanbueno, the cunning jungle guide whose strange brand of sadism implicates him in natural disasters, unnatural accidents, and mysterious disappearances and murders.

In the midst of Santiago's explorations and Hector's exploits, the village of Los Puentes Caidos is besieged by a series of horrors: floods, frogs, wasps, famous Frenchmen and, finally, a fatal tropical brain fever whose symptoms include an urge to waltz and a love of one's neighbor. As witness to the village's strange descent into madness, Daniel finds himself increasingly unable to distance himself. He discovers - to his mutual horror and satisfaction - how his own fate is inextricably linked to the fate of Los Puentes Caidos.

Winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award.