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A History of Water

Being an Account of a Murder, an Epic and Two Visions of Global History

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A History of Water

By: Edward Wilson-Lee
Narrated by: Richard Trinder
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A Times History Book of the Year 2022 A TLS Book of the Year 2022 ‘Exhilarating and whip-smart’ THE SUNDAY TIMES

From award-winning writer Edward Wilson-Lee, this is a thrilling true historical detective story set in sixteenth-century Portugal.

A History of Water follows the interconnected lives of two men across the Renaissance globe. One of them – an aficionado of mermen and Ethiopian culture, an art collector, historian and expert on water-music – returns home from witnessing the birth of the modern age to die in a mysterious incident, apparently the victim of a grisly and curious murder. The other – a ruffian, vagabond and braggart, chased across the globe from Mozambique to Japan – ends up as the national poet of Portugal.

The stories of Damião de Góis and Luís de Camões capture the extraordinary wonders that awaited Europeans on their arrival in India and China, the challenges these marvels presented to longstanding beliefs, and the vast conspiracy to silence the questions these posed about the nature of history and of human life.

Like all good mysteries, everyone has their own version of events.

 Civilization Cultural & Regional Europe Expeditions & Discoveries Spain World Africa Middle Ages Portugal Ancient History
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Critic reviews

PRAISE FOR A HISTORY OF WATER
‘[An] exhilarating book… passionate… employing prose as luscious as it is meticulous… delightful’
The Guardian
‘Erudite and engrossing…the book combines literary flair with deep historical insight… One of its many strengths is its vivid characterisation of people and places, not least those of Lisbon life high and low’
The Times
‘This exhilarating and whip-smart book…presents two competing visions of global history through the lives of two Portuguese travellers…This book is itself something of a wonder: beautifully written and utterly mesmerising. I loved every page’
The Sunday Times
‘Enthralling throughout’ The Economist
‘A wonderful – and wonder-full – recreation of a crucial episode in European history…the book has a rare beauty: written with elegant restraint, its every page is rich in a numinous sense of vanishings and misunderstandings’
Daily Telegraph
‘Fascinating, elegantly written’
The Spectator
‘A fascinating, ingenious and wonderfully readable book, brilliantly conceived… The book is a triumph.’ David Abulafia, Literary Review
‘A very few times in the course of a reader's life a book appears that shatters one's assumptions about how and why things came to pass. A History of Water is one such book. A mind-blowing achievement’
Alberto Manguel, author of The Library at Night
‘A truly engrossing read. Wilson-Lee has the rare knack of re-visiting even the most familiar places as if they were being discovered for the first time. His prose is rich, fluent, absorbing, and free from any affectation’
Fernando Cervantes, author of Conquistadores
‘This is a terrific book’
Gabriel Josipovici, author of What Ever Happened to Modernism?
‘I adored this… This is a dazzling, encyclopaedic history’
Dennis Duncan, author of Index, A History of The
All stars
Most relevant
This dense but mellifluous narrative is entertaining and instructive from the first page to the last. The writing is phenomenal - and the overall thesis of the narrative very thought-provoking. Should history have taken a different turn in the sixteenth century? Probably! And we are still suffering the consequences of the fact that it didn't.

Enthralling!

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A very different take on the drivers of history arguing convincly that human nature and perception that ones own culture and belief structure always win out as they are "obviously superior" and alternatives must be suppressed (the method varies) to maintain ones own core beliefs

Fascinating

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