Chapter 1: The Fall ·7
Chapter 2: The Jungle ·10
Chapter 3: The Hut ·21
Chapter 4, River 35
Chapter 5: The First Food ·51
Chapter 6: Fire ·58
Chapter 7: The Raft ·66
Chapter 8: First Voyage ·76
Chapter 9 Pineapple ·88
Chapter 10: Small Animals ·98
Chapter 11: The Monkey, the Ant, and the Bee ·108
Chapter 12: Con ·129
Chapter 13: Acting ·138
Chapter 14: Moving ·149
Chapter 15: The Cliff ·160
Chapter 16: The Explorer ·167
Chapter 17: Secrets ·183
Chapter 18: The Trap ·202
Chapter 19: Tarantulas · 218
20 Double-Baked Wazoh ·233
Chapter 21: Night Fishing ·250
Chapter 22: The Oath ·273
Chapter 23: Jungle School ·280
Chapter 24: Falling into the Mud ·289
Chapter 25 Max ·294
Chapter 26 Behind the Curtain ·300
Chapter 27: The Sky ·305
Chapter 28: Fear ·318
Chapter 29: Farewell ·329
Chapter 30: Another Exploration ·334

Epilogue - 12 Years Later ·338
Author's Note ·342

One day, the plane crashed.
The four surviving children face the vast Amazon jungle.
The river is teeming with piranhas and caimans, and the forests are teeming with ants and flying insects.
But somehow there is a way to survive!

★2017 Costa Book Awards Children's Book Award Winner
★2018 British Library Association Carnegie Medal Finalist
★Finalist for the Edward Stanford Children's Book of the Year

One day, four children were on a light plane heading to Manaus, Brazil when it crashed.
Tens of thousands of kilometers of Amazon jungle unfold before your eyes! Will you wait patiently for rescue, or will you find your own way? Four children, each with their own unique personalities, struggle, conflict, and compromise.
The first thing to do is to find something to eat and drink.
We need to light a fire and prepare a place to sleep.
Children explore, observe, take risks, and have adventures.
The children encounter countless secrets hidden in the jungle: tree fruits, rivers, abandoned huts, secret ancient cities, and even strange explorers.
Will your children be able to escape the jungle and reach Manaus?

Little explorers roaming the jungle

Columbus discovered the New World, Percy Fawcett set out to the Amazon to find a hidden ancient city, and Hiram Bingham discovered Machu Picchu.
All of these are famous explorers.
An explorer is someone who constantly explores, goes on adventures, and discovers unknown worlds.
What a wonderful job it would be to discover hidden lands! There are countless people in the world who aspire to be explorers.
But this book argues that explorers aren't just people with bushy mustaches, beige hats, and treks through the rugged Amazon rainforest.
The jungle is just like our lives.
It's endless, and I don't know when, where, or what will appear before me.
So we are all already explorers living in the jungle.

Here are four children who are suddenly dropped into the jungle when their plane to Manaus, Brazil crashes.
Your child, like all children, has some issues.
Fred has a severe lack of affection for his father, Con is deeply hurt by the world after being abandoned by his adoptive parents, Lila adores her younger brother, Max, but feels a tremendous burden to protect him, and Max is still a spoiled brat at five.
One day, these four children are given the opportunity to confront life head-on thanks to a fallen jungle.
For the first time, I was in a situation where I had to find something to eat rather than ignore my problems, complain, and blame life.
You have to find your own food and drink, and decide where to do your business.
You have to constantly confront your fears, such as climbing tall trees or cliffs where you would surely die if you fell.
I feel conflict and reconciliation over even the smallest of opinions, and I personally feel how many wounds I have inside.


That's how children go on adventures.
We grow by facing fear every moment.
If you find it difficult to eat the disgusting caterpillars, try making pancakes with cocoa beans. If you find it difficult to find your way on the ground, look at the river and the sky.
As the saying goes, even if the sky falls, there is a hole to escape from, so I first accept the circumstances given to me and try to find the answer within them.
Always be 'awake' like the explorer the children met in the jungle.

“You don’t have to be an explorer to know that this is a jungle.
In fact, everyone is already an explorer.
Exploration is just paying attention.
A beggar who looks at the world with open eyes and observes it.
If you're awake, that's enough."
-From page 272 of the text

“Take a risk! Find out what fear feels like!”
-From page 244 of the text

No matter what pitfalls life presents, if you devise your own way and face the world, there is nothing you cannot overcome.
I hope that everyone who reads this book will feel, along with the four little explorers who roam the jungle, that courage grows with fear, and joy grows with adventure.


Pain and joy, it's all in the jungle

The jungle forest never lets you relax for a moment.
There is nothing normal about it.
Ants have terrifying venom that causes 24-hour pain, and fish have teeth that can tear flesh.
You can't sleep well because of the American alligators and caimans that are over two meters long and the swarms of flies that are attracted to the smell of blood.

Moreover, all four children have different personalities.
Fred is a kid who always dreams of being an explorer, Lila is always willing to take on any challenge because she has to protect her little brother Max, but Con is very defensive and it takes him longer than other kids to overcome his fears.
So the kids fight over everything.
From whether to eat this or not, to whether to go this way or that way, to whether to take an adventure or to quit.

But we can't just tell children that the jungle is a sudden misfortune.
Although the scorching heat is oppressive, the sunlight sparkles between the leaves and the endless sky, something you can't see in the city, is clear.
Although the river is filled with electric eels, there are also beautiful pink dolphins spraying water overhead.
Even though the children fight as if they don't want to see each other at any moment, at some point they all laugh together so much that their noses fly off the ground.
Sometimes you'll be exhausted by endless tropical storms, and sometimes you'll be free to run around in the rain and create priceless memories.

In this way, the jungle has many faces.
It's not always dangerous, and it's not always safe.
Just as we can't say that life is always happy or always unhappy,
Just as both the front and back of a coin are coins, both sides of the jungle are also jungle.

This book, filled with danger and safety, fear and courage, sadness and happiness, conflict and deep friendship, conveys the message that every moment is meaningful.

Nature needs no hands

The Amazon is such an important part of the Earth's environment that it is called the lungs of the Earth.
However, the Amazon has reportedly lost 600,000 square kilometers in just 50 years due to illegal logging, drought, forest fires, and negligence.
The fact that the Amazon is being destroyed is a significant enough issue to be featured repeatedly in documentaries.

Catherine Rundell, the author of this book, is a writer who has received much attention in the English-speaking world, having been nominated for the Carnegie Medal, often called the Nobel Prize of children's literature, and winning the Costa Book Award for Children's Books.
Catherine Rundell's work always features children courageously and actively tackling challenges, but this time she also emphasizes the importance of nature.

She said that after her trip to the Amazon, she was deeply moved to the point where she felt a new appreciation for the word beauty.
And I also became interested in protecting the Amazon.
The book always advises readers to live their lives with an explorer's attitude, but one of the characters, the missing explorer MacLaren, wants the world to know about the secret jungle city he and his children discovered.
This means that explorers are not necessarily the ones who have to tell something.
Because when you reveal hidden things to the world, people gather and the original beauty is damaged.

“I know.
You're going to love this place!
And yet you don't know why this place should be kept a secret?
It's a gamble against such a beautiful place.
How can you still not know how crazy this is!
You don't understand.
If you just talk nonsense for fun or popularity,
You will realize that it doesn't work."
-From page 243 of the text

Just as the saying goes that the reason the desert is beautiful is because of the hidden pools of water, living faithfully in the belief that there is a beautiful land in a corner of the world that I don't know about becomes another joy in life.
Preserving nature as it is requires no intervention from our hands or footprints.