Part cultural history, part reportage and part personal journey, Take Me to the Source is the fascinating story of the substance that makes life on earth possible.

Water is both the simplest thing on earth and the most complex. We cannot live without it, yet it kills six thousand children a day. It is the ultimate renewable resource but we pollute it on a heroic scale.

In this enthralling voyage of discovery, Rupert Wright sets out to discover exactly what water is and why it plays such an important role in history, culture, art and literature. He penetrates to the heart of the development world supposedly bringing piped water to the poor, visits a bishop in Brazil willing to give up his life to save a river, and a child in India who waits by the roadside every morning for a bucket of water. He describes Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings, the Parisian bar that serves fifty types of mineral water, and the work of the engineers building an underground water supply to Manhattan.

Wright asks why, if water is so valuable does nobody want to pay for it unless it comes in a designer bottle? Is it really the oil of the twenty-first century? Will we all soon be fighting over it, or can it lead countries into co-operation rather than conflict?