-
Access Our
Best Book Club
Books of 2025!
A True Story
A five-hundred-year-old legend. An ancient curse. A stunning medical mystery. And a pioneering journey into the unknown heart of the world's densest jungle.
Since the days of conquistador Hernán Cortés, rumors have circulated about a lost city of immense wealth hidden somewhere in the Honduran interior, called the White City or the Lost City of the Monkey God. Indigenous tribes speak of ancestors who fled there to escape the Spanish invaders, and they warn that anyone who enters this sacred city will fall ill and die. In 1940, swashbuckling journalist Theodore Morde returned from the rainforest with hundreds of artifacts and an electrifying story of having found the Lost City of the Monkey God-but then committed suicide without revealing its location.
Three quarters of a century later, bestselling author Doug Preston joined a team of scientists on a groundbreaking new quest. In 2012 he climbed aboard a rickety, single-engine plane carrying the machine that would change everything: lidar, a highly advanced, classified technology that could map the terrain under the densest rainforest canopy. In an unexplored valley ringed by steep mountains, that flight revealed the unmistakable image of a sprawling metropolis, tantalizing evidence of not just an undiscovered city but an enigmatic, lost civilization.
Venturing into this raw, treacherous, but breathtakingly beautiful wilderness to confirm the discovery, Preston and the team battled torrential rains, quickmud, disease-carrying insects, jaguars, and deadly snakes. But it wasn't until they returned that tragedy struck: Preston and others found they had contracted in the ruins a horrifying, sometimes lethal-and incurable-disease.
Suspenseful and shocking, filled with colorful history, hair-raising adventure, and dramatic twists of fortune, The Lost City of the Monkey God is the absolutely true, eyewitness account of one of the great discoveries of the twenty-first century.
"Starred Review. A story that moves from thrilling to sobering, fascinating to downright scary - trademark Preston, in other words, and another winner." - Kirkus
"Replete with informative archaeology lessons and colorful anecdotes about the challenges Elkins' crew faced during the expedition, including torrential rains and encounters with deadly snakes, Preston's uncommon travelogue is as captivating as any of his more fanciful fictional thrillers." - Booklist
"For anyone who dreams of lost times and places - and who doesn't? - this is the book. Revelatory, chilling, creepy, and alive with deadly snakes and insects bearing incurable disease, it's high adventure at its best, and all true." - Erik Larson, New York Times bestselling author of Dead Wake and The Devil in the White City
"What reader could resist a new book by Douglas Preston? Not this reader. Preston's book offers rewards for both the mystery fan and the nonfiction aficionado. The Lost Cityis addictive-fast-paced and riveting, but it's also important. We mustn't repeat the cataclysmic mistakes of the past." - James Patterson
"If you're going to explore a lost city - in this case one that vultures, poisonous snakes, sand flies, and mudholes have protected for 500 years - you really only want to do it with Douglas Preston. A tale of bravado, chicanery, and impossible dreams, arresting at every turn, no less so in its unexpected, pulse-racing coda." - Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Witches: Salem, 1692, and Cleopatra: A Life
"Douglas Preston, at great risk to his own life, has produced a thrilling and powerful adventure story. Not only does he leave the reader fitfully turning the pages, he sheds an important light on what the Americas looked like before the arrival of Christopher Columbus and on the fragility of our own civilization." - David Grann, New York Times bestselling author of The Lost City of Z
"Inured to personal danger, braving venomous snakes and lethal pathogens, he somehow gets it all - the science, the history, the intrigues, the obsessive characters, the electric moment of discovery, and the haunted cries of a once-powerful civilization. Preston's marvelous story is made all the more potent by the astonishing fact that, from beginning to end, it happens to be true." - Hampton Sides, bestselling author of In the Kingdom of Ice
"A great true adventure, filled with danger, close calls, better-than-Hollywood characters, and a lost world that reaches through time and into everyone's future. One of the best nonfiction books I've read." - Robert Kurson, New York Times bestselling author of Shadow Divers and Pirate Hunters
"The Lost City of the Monkey God is a throwback to the golden age of adventure archaeology, the thrilling true story of a group of explorers penetrating one of the toughest jungles on earth in search of a lost city...and finding it. Preston is a terrific writer of both non-fiction books and bestselling novels, and makes you feel the dark heart of this lost Honduran wilderness." - John Sandford, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author of the #1 New York Times bestselling Prey series of novels
This information about The Lost City of the Monkey God was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
© Christine Preston
Douglas Preston has published forty books of both nonfiction and fiction, of which over thirty have been New York Times bestsellers, a half-dozen reaching the #1 position. He is the co-author, with Lincoln Child, of the Pendergast series of thrillers. He also writes nonfiction pieces for the New Yorker Magazine. He worked as an editor at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and taught nonfiction writing at Princeton University. He is president emeritus of the Authors Guild and serves on the Advisory Board of the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe.
.gif)
Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
