This article needs additional citations for verification .(May 2013) |
Author | T. C. Boyle |
---|---|
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Publisher | Little Brown |
Publication date | 1981 |
Media type | Print (hardcover & paperback) |
Pages | 437 pp |
ISBN | 0-316-10467-1 |
OCLC | 7733729 |
813/.54 19 | |
LC Class | PS3552.O932 W3 |
Water Music is the first novel by T. C. Boyle, published in 1981. It is a semifictional historical fiction adventure set in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
The novel follows the parallel adventures and intertwining fates of its protagonists. Ned Rise is a luckless and purely fictional petty criminal traveling with the historically based explorer Mungo Park through various locales in Scotland and England, then on two Imperial British expeditions into Western Africa to explore the Niger River. [1]
Water Music is loosely based on historical sources, including Mungo Park's 1799 book, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa. Its foreword admits that Boyle does not claim historical accuracy nor faithfulness to dubious contemporary accounts.
The Niger River is the main river of West Africa, extending about 4,180 km (2,600 mi). Its drainage basin is 2,117,700 km2 (817,600 sq mi) in area. Its source is in the Guinea Highlands in south-eastern Guinea near the Sierra Leone border. It runs in a crescent shape through Mali, Niger, on the border with Benin and then through Nigeria, discharging through a massive delta, known as the Niger Delta, into the Gulf of Guinea in the Atlantic Ocean. The Niger is the third-longest river in Africa, exceeded by the Nile and the Congo River. Its main tributary is the Benue River.
Sir Henry Rider Haggard was an English writer of adventure fiction romances set in exotic locations, predominantly Africa, and a pioneer of the lost world literary genre. He was also involved in land reform throughout the British Empire. His stories, situated at the lighter end of Victorian literature, continue to be popular and influential.
King Solomon's Mines (1885) is a popular novel by the English Victorian adventure writer and fabulist Sir H. Rider Haggard. It tells of a search of an unexplored region of Africa by a group of adventurers led by Allan Quatermain for the missing brother of one of the party. It is one of the first English adventure novels set in Africa and is considered to be the genesis of the lost world literary genre. Haggard dedicated this book to his childhood idol Humphry Davy.
Trainspotting is a 1996 British black comedy-drama film directed by Danny Boyle and starring Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller, Kevin McKidd, Robert Carlyle, and Kelly Macdonald in her film debut. Based on the 1993 novel of the same title by Irvine Welsh, the film was released in the United Kingdom on 23 February 1996.
Kentigern, known as Mungo, was a missionary in the Brittonic Kingdom of Strathclyde in the late sixth century, and the founder and patron saint of the city of Glasgow.
The Yarrow Water is a river in the Borders in the south east of Scotland. It is a tributary of the Ettrick Water and renowned for its high quality trout and salmon fishing. The name "Yarrow" may derive from the Celtic word garw meaning "rough" or possibly share a derivation with the English name "Jarrow".
Thomas Coraghessan Boyle is an American novelist and short story writer. Since the mid-1970s, he has published nineteen novels and more than 150 short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner award in 1988, for his third novel, World's End, which recounts 300 years in upstate New York.
Mungo Park was a Scottish explorer of West Africa. After an exploration of the upper Niger River around 1796, he wrote a popular and influential travel book titled Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa in which he theorized the Niger and Congo merged to become the same river, though it was later proven that they are different rivers. He was killed during a second expedition, having successfully travelled about two-thirds of the way down the Niger.
Alejo Carpentier y Valmont was a Cuban novelist, essayist, and musicologist who greatly influenced Latin American literature during its famous "boom" period. Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, of French and Russian parentage, Carpentier grew up in Havana, Cuba, and despite his European birthplace, he strongly identified as Cuban throughout his life. He traveled extensively, particularly in France, and to South America and Mexico, where he met prominent members of the Latin American cultural and artistic community. Carpentier took a keen interest in Latin American politics and often aligned himself with revolutionary movements, such as Fidel Castro's Communist Revolution in Cuba in the mid-20th century. Carpentier was jailed and exiled for his leftist political philosophies.
Robert Erskine Childers DSC, usually known as Erskine Childers, was an English-born Irish writer, politician, and militant. His works included the influential novel The Riddle of the Sands. Starting as an ardent Unionist, he later became a supporter of Irish Republicanism and smuggled guns into Ireland in his sailing yacht Asgard. He was executed by the authorities of the nascent Irish Free State during the Irish Civil War. He was the son of British Orientalist scholar Robert Caesar Childers; the cousin of Hugh Childers and Robert Barton; and the father of the fourth President of Ireland, Erskine Hamilton Childers.
The Temple of Elemental Evil is an adventure module for the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, set in the game's World of Greyhawk campaign setting. The module was published by TSR, Inc. in 1985 for the first edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rules. It was written by Gary Gygax and Frank Mentzer, and is an expansion of an earlier Gygax module, The Village of Hommlet. The Temple of Elemental Evil is also the title of a related 2001 Thomas M. Reid novel and an Atari computer game.
The Aubrey–Maturin series is a sequence of nautical historical novels—20 completed and one unfinished—by English author Patrick O'Brian, set during the Napoleonic Wars and centring on the friendship between Captain Jack Aubrey of the Royal Navy and his ship's surgeon Stephen Maturin, a physician, natural philosopher, and intelligence agent. The first novel, Master and Commander, was published in 1969 and the last finished novel in 1999. The 21st novel of the series, left unfinished at O'Brian's death in 2000, appeared in print in late 2004. The series received considerable international acclaim, and most of the novels reached The New York Times Best Seller list. These novels comprise the heart of the canon of an author often compared to Jane Austen, C. S. Forester and other British authors central to English literature.
Geraldine Brooks is an Australian-American journalist and novelist whose 2005 novel March won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Mumbo jumbo, or mumbo-jumbo, is confusing or meaningless language. The phrase is often used to express humorous criticism of middle-management, and specialty jargon, such as legalese, that non-specialists have difficulty in understanding. For example, "I don't understand all that legal mumbo jumbo in the fine print."
Joseph Thomson was a British geologist and explorer who played an important part in the Scramble for Africa. Thomson's gazelle and Thomson's Falls, Nyahururu are named after him. Excelling as an explorer rather than an exact scientist, he avoided confrontations among his porters or with indigenous peoples, neither killing any native nor losing any of his men to violence. His motto is often quoted to be "He who goes gently, goes safely; he who goes safely, goes far."
Chander Pahar is a Bengali adventure novel written by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay and published in 1937. The novel follows the adventures of a young Bengali man in the forests of Africa. The novel is one of the most-loved adventure novels in the Bengali literature and is one of Bibhutibhushan's most popular works. It spawned a media franchise.
Indiana Jones is an American media franchise consisting of five films and a prequel television series, along with games, comics, and tie-in novels, that depicts the adventures of Dr. Henry Walton "Indiana" Jones, Jr., a fictional professor of archaeology.
A Falcon Flies is a novel by Wilbur Smith. It was the first in a series of books known as The Ballantyne Novels.
Events from the year 1771 in Scotland.
Chander Pahar is an Indian Bengali language franchise consisting of novels, graphic novels and a film series. The original work is a 1937 novel named Chander Pahar, written by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay. It was translated to English in 2002 by Santanu Sinha Choudhuri and Pradeep Kumar Sinha, published by Orient Blackswan. The English version of the novel was titled Mountain of the Moon. Bandyopadhyay’s story was adapted into a Graphic novel and a live-action film in 2013. A sequel to the 2013 film Amazon Obhijaan, written by the director of the first film Kamaleswar Mukherjee, is released in Christmas 2017.