The Green Below

Ten thousand feet above the Amazon, the plane came apart.

On 21 December 1971 a domestic flight leaves Lima for the eastern Andes and breaks up in a thunderstorm. Ninety-two people fall. One of them is seventeen years old and still strapped into her seat.

Eleven days later she walks out of the rainforest on her own feet.

The newspapers call it a miracle. She is photographed holding a glass of water, and she does not correct them.

She is not a miracle. She is a girl who was lucky about a tree, and then had to be lucky about water, and about a leg that would not stop going bad, and about forty-three sweets that had to last eleven days. She kept a count of everything, because counting was the only thing left that answered her.

She has been counting ever since. The count is the only thing in her life that has never lied to her.

The Green Below is the first book of the Canopy Trilogy. It is a novel about altitude and debt - about what it costs to be the one who lives, and about a question a seventeen-year-old girl is too frightened, or too proud, to ask out loud.

What readers should know

• First person, past tense. The narrator is seventeen and does not explain herself.


• No antagonist. What wants her dead is distance, rain, and infection.


• Book One of three. It answers whether she gets out, and opens the question of why nobody came.