'Bold, bewitching and a touch dangerous - like Lord Byron himself' Benedict Allen

'Hugh Thomson is a mesmerising storyteller' Sara Wheeler

What would have happened if the poet Lord Byron had not died an early death in Greece?

But instead had lived - and then some - by doing what his letters show he always wanted to do.

Escape to South America with the great last love of his life, Countess Teresa Guiccioli, and help Simon Bolivar liberate it from the Spanish.

This great sweep of a novel imagines just that and takes the poet and his lover into a New World of the Americas where nothing is ever quite as they expect.

Hugh Thomson is an award-winning writer whose previous books have explored the world from Peru to England, and whose films have been nominated for a BAFTA.

The White Rock and Cochineal Red were about his search for Inca ruins; Nanda Devi, a journey to a wild and usually forbidden part of the Himalaya; while his memoir Tequila Oil: Getting Lost in Mexico was serialised by BBC Radio 4.

He returned home for The Green Road into the Trees which won the inaugural Wainwright Prize for Best Nature and Travel Writing. 'An immensely enjoyable book: curious, articulate, intellectually playful and savagely candid.' Spectator.

"Everywhere Thomson goes, he finds good stories to tell." New York Times Book Review

'He takes the reader to places we may not have dreamed of going - places of geography, the spirit and the emotions.' Independent