Red Nile

By Robert Twigger,

Book cover of Red Nile: The Biography of the World's Greatest River

Book description

A rip-roaring yet intimate biography of the mighty Nile by Robert Twigger, award-winning author of ANGRY WHITE PYJAMAS. 'A tour de force' FINANCIAL TIMES.

So much begins on the banks of the Nile: all religion, all life, all stories, the script we write in, the language we speak, the gods,…

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Why read it?

2 authors picked Red Nile as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I have been dreaming of Egypt recently (an inevitable consequence of five years of working away on my own book on Napoleon in Egypt). The monuments, the glories, the lone and level sands which stretch far away. And the Nile, giver of life, benefactor of bounty.

It would never have occurred to me to tell Egypt’s story by following the course of that great waterway as it rises, flows through Cairo, and on to meet the Mediterranean.

But this was Robert Twigger’s way, and his book is one of the finest on Egypt and why the Nile is so central…

Where I wrote The Black Nile as a white-knuckle current history of the Nile region, British polymath Robert Twigger took the long view to craft an absorbing portrait of the Nile, from Biblical times to the present. Twigger, whose adventures have taken him from the Canadian Rockies to Indonesian hill country to the karate dojo of the Tokyo riot police, has, with Red Nile, written a moving, cinematic masterpiece.

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