THE TOP FIVE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER This is the story of one lost poem, two great rivers, and three remarkable lives - all connected by a single drop of water. ***** In the ruins of Nineveh, that ancient city of Mesopotamia, there lies hidden in the sand fragments of a long-forgotten poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh. In Victorian London, an extraordinary child is born at the edge of the dirt-black Thames. When his brilliant memory earns him a spot as an apprentice at a printing press, the world opens up far beyond the slums and across the seas. In 2014 Turkey, Narin, a Yazidi girl living by the River Tigris, waits to be baptised. The ceremony is cruelly interrupted, and soon she and her grandmother must journey across war-torn lands in the hope of reaching the sacred valley of their people. In 2018 London, broken-hearted Zaleekhah, a hydrologist, moves to a houseboat on the Thames to escape the wreckage of her marriage - until an unexpected connection to her homeland changes everything. A dazzling feat of storytelling from one of the greatest writers of our time that spans centuries, continents and cultures, entwined by rivers, rains, and waterdrops.