On the surface, this novel is an inspiring tale of friendship and travel set in a crumbling world. On a deeper plane, it is an arraignment levelled at a complacent modern-day humanity for its failure to protect the earth, and itself, from its own ravages. Joss Douglas is a young man who sees the world the way it really is, but a formative experience in Africa opens his eyes to the flaws in how he plans and lives his own life. Some years later, in a world in which global civilization is faltering, with a climate that grows harsher and wilder with each passing season, he no longer sees the sense in his ordered existence, and feels that he is working towards nothing. With his fiancée Tina, who has distant roots in Brazil, he steps out of his conventional programme and they set off on a voyage of discovery to South America. While they are away, rioting, disorder and crackdowns at home leave them with the sensation that it is their home no longer. Cut adrift from their country, they must decide where they will subsequently take their lives. Fate brings them together with their friends and this diverse band of misfits, a generation in microcosm, acquire a Brazilian Kombi camper van and journey among the myriad landscapes and cultures of the South American continent, in search of a place where they can ride out tumultuous world events. It is a trip full of spectacle and colour, that takes them to Patagonia, the high Andes of Bolivia and the coast of the Pacific Ocean, and on which they must learn to break free of the rules by which they have lived all their lives. Ready to take on their future, they travel with irreverent and irrepressible humour, a healthy disrespect for authority and a well-preserved sense of wonder. For wanderers and wonderers: This is a book that explores the unsettling question of what to do and where to go when the warm embrace of civilization, and the comfort of a future that is certain, begin to fall apart.