num_pages: 344
description: 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 Damio de Gis and Lus de Cames 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.
language: English
title: A History of Water: Being an Account of a Murder, an Epic and Two Visions of Global History
publisher: William Collins