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Hard by the Cloud House
Vorbestellbar | Lieferzeit: Vorbestellbar - Erscheint laut Verlag im/am 11.07.2024. I
Erstverkaufstag: 11.07.2024
Artikel-Nr:
9781991016713
Veröffentl:
2024
Erscheinungsdatum:
11.07.2024
Seiten:
288
Autor:
Peter Walker
Sprache:
Englisch
Beschreibung:
Peter Walker grew up in Christchurch and began his writing career as a journalist in Wellington and then Sydney. He moved to London in 1986 and joined The Independent and later the Independent on Sunday where he was Foreign Editor. He also wrote for the Literary Review, the Financial Times books pages and Granta. He is the author of the historical memoir The Fox Boy (Bloomsbury, 2001), set in Taranaki, and his first novel was The Courier's Tale (Bloomsbury, 2010), set in Italy and the court of Henry VIII.
The legend of Te Hokioi, the extinct giant eagle of New Zealand, leads Peter Walker from a Canterbury sheep run to the Rare Books Room of the British Library and to ' sacred' Raiatea in Polynesia, as he uncovers the story of the predator which once ruled over the Southern Alps. Was this bird, whose existence was confirmed by scientists only in 2009, the Rukh of Arab legends? Does that mean that medieval Islamic mariners were once blown far into the Pacific, saw the great raptor and made it back home to tell the tale? From the calamitous encounter of South Island Maori with colonisation to the glories of tenth-century Baghdad, Hard by the Cloud House is a heady mix of history, memoir, science and mythology.