Another Bone-Swapping Event
Published on 6. November 2025
Book
Hardback
336 pages
978-1-83773-356-9 (ISBN)
Description
Brad Fox takes us on a wild exploration of plants and people, imagination and matter, over an unexpected year-long waylay in the high jungle of northeastern Peru.
In Another Bone-Swapping Event, Brad Fox tells the story of a year he spent stuck in the high jungles of Peru living with a family of Quechua-speaking curanderos responsible for a hundred-hectare stretch of jungle four hours' walk from the nearest dirt road. In the care of local maestro Miguel Tapullima, Fox gets a crash course in traditional medicine and takes readers on a labyrinthine tour, in turn contemplative and comic, navigating the coexisting realities of the human and more-than-human world.
Through it all, the lush prose that made The Bathysphere Book so distinct turns this book into its own rich and multi-layered experience, because with Brad Fox as our guide we're able to stretch our minds to encompass histories and meanings, metaphysical questions at the base of phenomena, and the shattering ironies of the moment, all during peak COVID, when no one knew how our collective future might unfold.
In Another Bone-Swapping Event, Brad Fox tells the story of a year he spent stuck in the high jungles of Peru living with a family of Quechua-speaking curanderos responsible for a hundred-hectare stretch of jungle four hours' walk from the nearest dirt road. In the care of local maestro Miguel Tapullima, Fox gets a crash course in traditional medicine and takes readers on a labyrinthine tour, in turn contemplative and comic, navigating the coexisting realities of the human and more-than-human world.
Through it all, the lush prose that made The Bathysphere Book so distinct turns this book into its own rich and multi-layered experience, because with Brad Fox as our guide we're able to stretch our minds to encompass histories and meanings, metaphysical questions at the base of phenomena, and the shattering ironies of the moment, all during peak COVID, when no one knew how our collective future might unfold.
Reviews / Votes
Brad Fox has traveled to the centre of many worlds and here records a visit to the 'passionate nada' in his disarming, beautifully natural style. Stranded in a powerful landscape, a clear voice renders human situations in elegant sentences that build to animate profound heartache and self-discovery. Read Another Bone-Swapping Event and witness what transforms. * Eugene Lim, author of Search History and Fog & Car * Another Bone-Swapping Event is a trippy modern Decameron. Sequestered with an unlikely group of people from around the world, Brad Fox spent the covid pandemic in the Peruvian mountains under the care of a curandero with vast knowledge of medicinal plants. In this polyphonic book, the voices of humans and plants are woven into a dense meditation on suffering, healing, deception, truth, and what it means to be a living being on Earth. * Marcia Bjornerud, author of Turning to Stone: Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks * Another Bone-Swapping Event is a profound meditation on what it means to exist on a fragile and vulnerable planet while simultaneously exploring its frayed, otherworldly edges. * Joanna Pocock, author of Surrender and Greyhound * Sometimes a book's title is sufficiently striking, and its subject-in this case, traditional medicine and the jungles of Peru-sufficiently unfamiliar to me, that it instantly lands a spot on my TBR. This is one of those times. * Calvin Kasulke, Lit Hub * Brad Fox has an uncommon talent for being able to see the light in plight. This book, about a journey to an unfamiliar culture of thought and medicinal practice, of plants and spiritual transparency, is potent and funny and moving, an Odyssey of our time. * Sumana Roy, author of How I Became A Tree and Provincials * Another Bone-Swapping Event is a revelatory fever dream in which the world around us peels away to expose the secret patterns beneath. Visceral, unnerving, and ultimately transformative, it is an astonishing achievement. * James Bradley, author of Deep Water and Ghost Species *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Duxford
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 241 mm
Width: 163 mm
Thickness: 30 mm
Weight
494 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-83773-356-9 (9781837733569)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Brad Fox's The Bathysphere Book was a winner of the 2024 National Book Foundation's Science + Literature Award and a Washington Post Top Ten Best Book of 2023 and Publishers Weekly Best Nonfiction Book of 2023 and was called 'Hypnotic . . . Beautifully written and beautifully made' by the New York Times. He is the author of the novel To Remain Nameless and has written for The New Yorker, Guernica, Public Domain Review, and The Whitney Biennial.