Water Music (The Penguin Contemporary American Fiction Series)

T.C. Boyle's riotous first novel—now in a new edition for its 25th anniversary

Twenty five years ago, T.C. Boyle published his first novel, Water Music—a funny, bawdy, extremely entertaining novel of imaginative and stylistic fancy that announced to the world Boyle's tremendous gifts as a storyteller. Set in the late eighteenth century, Water Music follows the wild adventures of Ned Rise, thief and whoremaster, and Mungo Park, a Scottish explorer, through London's seamy gutters and Scotland's scenic highlands—to their grand meeting in the heart of darkest Africa. There they join forces and wend their hilarious way to the source of the Niger. BACKCOVER: “Ribald, hilarious, exotic—an engrossing flight of the literary imagination.”

—Los Angeles Times

“Water Music does for fiction what Raiders of the Lost Ark did for film. . . . Boyle is an adept plotter, a crazed humorist, and a fierce describer.”

—The Boston Globe

“High comic fiction . . . Boyle is a writer of considerable talent. He pulls off his most implausible inventions with wit, a perfect sense of timing, and his considerable linguistic gifts.”

—The Washington Post