Prepublication record (machine generated from publisher information)

Includes bibliographical references (pages [239] - 251)

Requiem with yellow butterflies -- Caracas -- We want them alive -- Roraima & Manaus -- Don't care if it ever rains again -- And the village was fair to look upon -- Redcliffe -- Old peak, young peak -- Uluru: how to travel without seeing -- Porto Velho & Brasilia -- Coetzee in Buenos Aires -- Parque Lezama -- Such loneliness in that gold -- San Miguel del Monte -- The lakeside house.

An Australian writer and a Mexican scientist fall in love reading great Latin American books aloud. But it takes a decade of journeys across the region, together and apart, for them to learn to read each other. Requiem with Yellow Butterflies is a love story and travel memoir that unfolds against the turbulent backdrop of Latin America in the 2000s. It takes us on a 1200-kilometre question-mark shaped loop through the newly socialist republics of the "pink tide," to a requiem mass for Mexico's disappeared and eventually back to Australia. Through evocative, unexpected pairings of southern hemisphere places and authors - Jose Maria Arguedas's Andes and Judith Wright's Cooloola coast, the Argentine pampa and the central Queensland brigalow country - the book explores distinct but parallel postcolonial literary traditions, the disordering state of love and the strangeness of coming home.