Adventures of a Small Game Hunter in Jamaica

Eleven-year-old Max is pulled from boarding school in England and delivered, with barely five minutes' warning, to the tropical island of Jamaica. He has never seen anything like it: hummingbirds that blur into invisibility, lizards that hiss from tree trunks, scorpions under every rock, and butterflies beyond anything he could have imagined.

Armed with a handmade net and a growing obsession, Max throws himself into Jamaica's wild places. He haunts the butterfly cabinets of Kingston's Institute of Jamaica, cycles Hope Road scanning for rarities, and convinces his father to drive him to cloud-shrouded mountain passes, dusty Cockpit Country tracks, and remote forest clearings, all in pursuit of creatures that constantly elude him.

Above all, he chases the Homerus swallowtail. Papilio homerus: Jamaica's largest butterfly and the largest in all the Americas. He sees it three times. He never catches it.

The butterflies in Max Overton's collection are now more than fifty years old, their colours faded, their wings tattered. But every one of them holds a story: the thrill of the chase, the sting of failure, and the discovery that some prizes are worth more uncaught.