A Times History Book of the Year 2022 A TLS Book of the Year 2022 ‘Exhilarating and whip-smart’ THE SUNDAY TIMES 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 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. Like all good mysteries, everyone has their own version of events.

WINNER OF THE 2019 PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE The fascinating history of Christopher Columbus's illegitimate son Hernando, guardian of his father's flame, courtier, bibliophile and catalogue supreme, whose travels took him to the heart of 16th-century Europe' Honor Clerk, Spectator, Books of the Year This is the scarcely believable - and wholly true - story of Christopher Columbus' bastard son Hernando, who sought to equal and surpass his father's achievements by creating a universal library. His father sailed across the ocean to explore the known boundaries of the world for the glory of God, Spain and himself. His son Hernando sought instead to harness the vast powers of the new printing presses to assemble the world's knowledge in one place, his library in Seville. Hernando was one of the first and greatest visionaries of the print age, someone who saw how the scale of available information would entirely change the landscape of thought and society. His was an immensely eventual life. As a youth, he spent years travelling in the New World, and spent one living with his father in a shipwreck off Jamaica. He created a dictionary and a geographical encyclopaedia of Spain, helped to create the first modern maps of the world, spent time in almost every major European capital, and associated with many of the great people of his day, from Ferdinand and Isabel to Erasmus, Thomas More, and Durer. He wrote the first biography of his father, almost single-handedly creating the legend of Columbus that held sway for many hundreds of years, and was highly influential in crafting how Europe saw the world his father reached in 1492. He also amassed the largest collection of printed images and of printed music of the age, started what was perhaps Europe's first botanical garden, and created by far the greatest private library Europe had ever seen, dwarfing with its 15,000 books every other library of the day. Edward Wilson-Lee has written the first major modern biography of Hernando - and the first of any kind available in English. In a work of dazzling scholarship, The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books tells an enthralling tale of the age of print and exploration, a story with striking lessons for our own modern experiences of information revolution and Globalisation.

A Times History Book of the Year 2022 A TLS Book of the Year 2022 'Exhilarating and whip-smart' THE SUNDAY TIMES 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 Damiao de Gois and Luis de Camoes 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. Like all good mysteries, everyone has their own version of events.

The untold story of the greatest library of the Renaissance and its creator Hernando Colon This engaging book offers the first comprehensive account of the extraordinary projects of Hernando Colon, son of Christopher Columbus, which culminated in the creation of the greatest library of the Renaissance, with ambitions to be universal--that is, to bring together copies of every book, on every subject and in every language. Perez Fernandez and Wilson-Lee situate Hernando's projects within the rapidly changing landscape of early modern knowledge, providing a concise history of the collection of information and the origins of public libraries, examining the challenges he faced and the solutions he devised. The two authors combine "meticulous research with deep and original thought," shedding light on the history of libraries and the organization of knowledge. The result is an essential reference text for scholars of the early modern period, and for anyone interested in the expansion and dissemination of information and knowledge.