Secret Jungle is a photographic record of one woman's determination to reveal the beauties of a vibrant yet endangered world. Nicole Viloteau has spent over twenty-five years exploring the world's jungles, from Gabon to Australia, from Madagascar to Brazil. This book presents a selection of some of the most dramatic encounters and experiences of her travels. Taking the form of simple, poetic, sketches of jungle scenes, Viloteau's text describes the pure emotion experienced traveling alone in the heart of nature. Yet it is the photographs that are the most compelling: vivid close-ups of exotic flowers, almost abstract in their graphic patterns and bold colors, rare tree-frogs and lizards, their skin glistening with poison, snakes with glittering scales and jewel-like eyes.

The book is divided into thematic chapters, illustrating the remarkable adaptability of jungle flora and fauna and the demands made upon them by their environment. With full-color photographs throughout, Secret Jungle presents a visually stunning world that is vanishing all too quickly.

Nicole Viloteau, explorer and photographer, has been uncovering the secrets of the world's remaining jungles for many years. She tamed her first lizard at the age of eight, and has gone on to become an internationally respected herpetologist, devoting her life to the study of reptiles in their natural habitat: from king snakes in the deserts of Northern Australia and vipers in the jungles of Gabon and Madagascar, to the giant dragons of Komodo. It is a passion that has nearly cost her her life on several occasions: she has been bitten on the lip by a rattlesnake and in the thigh by an angry mamba, gored by a buffalo, wounded by poachers, and has survived tropical diseases such as malaria. Yet she returns to the wildest places on earth again and again, fired by her desire to learn more about these creatures that inspire such primal fear and loathing.

Nicole Viloteau studied Fine Art in Paris and took up photography at the age of twenty. The camera has become an indispensable tool in her research and in her crusade to publicize the plight of the world's few remaining true wildernesses. Featuring reptiles, but also other flora and fauna of the tropics, Secret Jungle is both a showcase for her stunning photographs and a plea for the defense of the rainforest.

The author has published several bestselling books in her native France. This is her first work available in English.