A History of Water : William Collins : 9780008358228 : 0008358222 : 04 Aug 2022 : '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 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 Luìs d