Fieldwork
ABOUT
THE BOOK
When his girlfriend takes a job in Thailand, Mischa Berlinski goes along for the ride, planning to enjoy himself and work as little as possible. But one evening a fellow expatriate tips him off to a story: a charismatic American anthropologist, Martiya van der Leun, has been found dead–a suicide–in the Thai prison where she was serving a life sentence for murder. Curious at first, Mischa is soon immersed in the details of her story. This brilliant, haunting novel expands into a mystery set among the Thai hill tribes, whose way of life became a battleground for the missionaries and the scientists living among them.
NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS
Meticulously researched and vividly imagined, Fieldwork describes the fruitless competition between American missionaries and an American anthropologist for the souls of a remote Thai Hill tribe.