Virginia Mendoza's first memories are of drought. She grew up in La Mancha, Spain, the driest region in Europe. Her parents, grandparents, and almost every word, tool, and tradition of her homeland conveyed one conviction: without water, there is no life; without water, there is no civilization.In The Search for Water, Mendoza weaves this personal reflection together with a dazzling scientific and anthropological enquiry into the ways the search for water has shaped the story of humanity. From flows of migration, agriculture and pagan rain gods to contemporary struggles with drought and climate change, Mendoza writes a gripping and inventive history of humankind as driven and united by one force: thirst.



Virginia Mendoza studied Journalism and Social and Cultural Anthropology. She works as a freelance journalist and has written for various media in Spain and Latin America, and she has published books on rootedness and uprooting in which she fuses narrative journalism and rural anthropology. The Search for Water, a hybrid of essay, historical anthropology and memoir, is currently being translated into three languages.Thomas Bunstead was born in London in 1982 and lives in Pembrokeshire, west Wales. He has translated leading Spanish-language writers, including Maria Gainza and Enrique Vila-Matas, and won various awards, including an O. Henry Prize and the 2024 Cercador Prize for Literature in Translation.



An evocative, richly researched blend of family and human history that sparked my imagination and my sense of wonder



Inventive and far-reaching... By weaving personal memory with planetary history, Virginia Mendoza invites us into a long conversation between the living and the dead, between those who endured thirst in the past and those who will face it in the future



An extraordinary tour-de-force: Mendoza creates a watercolour of history that is by turns soaring and intimate, arresting and paradigm-shifting, drawing on cave-paintings, dendrochronology, myths, folksongs and climate science to show how weather patterns have shaped civilisations, migrations, revolutions, religions, cultures and lives across the planet, providing an essential background to the water wars that lie ahead



Mendoza roams across the planet to tell the fascinating story of the elementary drive for water. The Search for Water dives elegantly into meteorology, archeology, mythology, memory and more - enthralling



What knowledge, what capacity to connect and explain things that seem unconnected. An intellectual pleasure