The Geography Lesson

If only Tim Prescott had not cracked the pages of the architectural design magazine that afternoon in March of 2007, his retirement might have proceeded normally. The photo of the Pueblo III-era jar stopped him dead. How is it that a single glimpse of an image in a magazine could change his life forever?

A celebrated National Geographic writer, Prescott spots a distinctive vase he last saw in a magnificent Anasazi ruin in southern Utah almost forty years ago. In 1968, he and photographer Wesley Channing discovered Blood House in Skinned Knee Canyon, a forty-mile trek from Mexican Hat. But between the moment the pair discovered the ruin and their return some weeks later with US government officials, the site had been ransacked, creating a Washington kerfuffle that disgraced the National Geographic Society.

At the moment Prescott saw the vase in the magazine photo spread on the luxury condo owned by a hedge fund millionaire, he knew exactly who betrayed him and who it was that embroiled the National Geographic Society and Prescott himself in that scandal. Prescott and Channing return to work for National Geographic and to confront what happened in an obscure canyon out West—a trip that may have fatal consequences.

In The Geography Lesson, his first new novel in more than twenty years, bestselling author John Buckley returns with a tale that is part adventure story, part love letter by an elderly man to his recently deceased wife, and part deeply funny exploration of the National Geographic Society.