History of Water

A Times History Book of the Year 2022A TLS Book of the Year 2022‘Exhilarating and whip-smart’ THE SUNDAY TIMES

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