The Liquid Continent

Travels through Alexandria, Venice and Istanbul
By Nicholas Woodsworth

This omnibus edition brings together the three books of Nicholas Woodsworth’s critically-acclaimed Mediterranean Trilogy in a single volume for the first time, allowing the reader to fully appreciate the scope of Woodsworth’s search for a distinctively Mediterranean ‘cosmopolitanism’. Combining travel narrative, history and reflection on contemporary lives and cultures, Woodsworth finds an intimacy, a garrulous warmth and a near-tribal sociability as he travels from Alexandria, through Venice and finally installs himself in a former Benedictine monastery in Istanbul overlooking the Golden Horn. Responding to this experience, he argues that the sea should not be seen as an empty space surrounded by Europe, Asia and Africa, but as a single entity, a place from whose coastlines people look inwards over the water to each other, for it has its own cities, its own life, its own way of being.

As Woodsworth visits the famous Alexandria Library – which now holds less than a hundredth of the volumes it has the space for – works on a boat as a deliveryman in Venice during the aqua alta, and hears stories of infamous (to the locals) gay and lesbian three-day festivals on the Greek island of Lesbos, he considers the importance of links other than national identity. In Istanbul, he reflects on the millet – the system that, under the Ottoman Empire, allowed conquered groups to retain their own religious and ethnic identities under the protection of the Sultan – and how it prefigured multinational communities today. Ultimately, he answers his own question, posed at the beginning of his journey; ‘Marseilles is very much like Alexandria. Marseilles and Alexandria have the same way of looking at the world. Barcelona, Thessalonica, Tangier, Palermo, Beirut, Valletta ... walk down the street in any of those ports and you feel the same thing. Why is that?’

‘[Woodsworth’s] enchanting journey around the old seaports… a Mediterranean trilogy to cherish’ – The Guardian

‘An astute reporter with a dry humour and an impressive eye for detail’ – Sunday Telegraph