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Vendor
Liepman Literary Agency
Marc Koralnik
Original language
English

A HISTORY OF WATER

Edward Wilson-Lee

containing a murder, an epic, and the Renaissance undiscovery of the world

Vivid narrative non-fiction with a flavour of The Name of the Rose — poetry and history, murder and intrigue in 16th 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.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Edward Wilson-Lee is a Fellow in English at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he teaches medieval and Renaissance literature. After growing up in Kenya and Switzerland, he went to university in London, New York, Oxford and Cambridge, living briefly in Mexico and New Orleans in between.
His previous books SHAKESPEARE IN SWAHILILAND and THE CATALOGUE OF SHIPWRECKED BOOKS have been widely acclaimed, published in the UK and US, and translated into 8 languages.
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Book

Published 2022-08-01 by HarperCollins

Comments

Bollati Boringhieri

Bertrand

‘A wonderful – and wonder-full – recreation of a crucial episode in European history The book also has a rare beauty; written with elegant restraint, its every page is rich in numinous sense of vanishings and misunderstandings, gaps in the records, marvels and mysteries Without any playing around in the twilight zone between fact and fiction, Wilson-Lee has conjured up a hauntingly vivid evocation of a moment when the spread of empire could be regarded as “a broadening of the meaning of humanity” and cultural dialogue.'

Kachi Publishing Co.

Ariel