Having grown up in Kenya and Switzerland, with periods living in Mexico, Zimbabwe, and the United States, Edward Wilson-Lee now lives in Cambridge, where he teaches Renaissance literature and is a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College. His research focuses on books, libraries, and travel, which during this project has involved journeys to and through Spain, Italy, India, and the Caribbean. He is the author of Shakespeare in Swahililand and The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books, which won the Pen Hessell-Tiltman Prize.
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
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