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A gorgeously written hybrid of memoir, travel and cultural history that explores how water altered LA and the history of film
A BEST BOOK OF 2025 - TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
‘Outrageously good … An unforgettable book’ – OLIVIA LAING
‘Reverie and road-trip, Aqua succeeds in turning the Cadillac Desert and Land of Little Rain into something lush and unexpected … Chiara Barzini ducts and dives through a wonderful and revelatory journey’ - GEOFF DYER
In 1913, William Mulholland finished building the Los Angeles Aqueduct – a 233-mile engineering masterwork transporting water from the Owens Valley, across the desert, to a barren corner of California that would become the home of filmmaking.
Over one hundred years later, award-winning Italian author and filmmaker Chiara Barzini traces the geography of the aqueduct, from its source, across the desert, to the city that it helped into existence, all while reckoning with her personal history with the landscape. From the ‘fake’ waters of the Universal Studios Jaws attraction to Salton Sea – California’s largest lake and ‘the only man-made mistake visible from space’ – Aqua explores how water, and its absence, shaped both a modern landscape and the history of film.
A blend of travel writing, philosophy, cultural history and memoir, Aqua is a hugely entertaining and wide-ranging exploration of water, film, dreams versus reality and an empire on the brink of catastrophe.
“This timely and excellent book is a modern day parable, vividly demonstrating the lengths that humans have gone to bend the planet to their will, regardless of logic, buoyed by the conviction that mankind can — and will always — solve any physical problem in its path. As Aqua so brilliantly shows, this is no longer the case. Los Angeles is living on borrowed time”
financial Times
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“An extraordinary meditation on grandiosity, crumbling dreams, and climate crisis”
times Literary Supplement
“Truly gripping … Barzini creates such rich portraits of these otherworldly places, each so different from anywhere this side of the Atlantic … I urge you to read it”
times
“In her absorbing, reflective road trip through the geographical traumas of America’s most populated and (some of us believe) most beautiful state, the Italian novelist and film writer (and longtime California resident) Chiara Barzini finds it difficult to disentangle the horrific from the sublime”
the Spectator
”Aqua was like going on a great adventure to unknown parts, but with a woman companion who helped me see many things from a new perspective. Water of course isn’t only water, it is life itself; and so what begins as a research of the Mulholland project diverting water from the Owens Valley to Los Angeles held aloft by successive meetings with a Hollywood Director held me fascinated until the very end”
Francis Ford Coppola
Chiara Barzini
Chiara Barzini is an award-winning Italian screen and fiction writer. She lived and studied in the United States where she covered lifestyle and culture stories for numerous American and Italian publications. She writes and translates both in English and Italian and is the author of the short story collection Sister Stop Breathing (Calamari Press, 2012) and the novel Things That Happened Before the Earthquake (Doubleday, 2017) which was a Best Book of the Year for Vogue, Esquire, Elle, Bustle, and the Guardian, and a best summer book for the New York Times, Publisher’s Weekly, BBC, and Oprah! magazine. Her fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and journals. She has a regular column in D Repubblica and is a Literature Advisor at the American Academy in Rome.
@chiarabarzini