1519

John has had great success with his prior travel books, winning Wales Book of the Year in both 2009 and 2013, as well as the British Guild of Travel Writers Best Narrative Award 2014. The book will be launched at the Edinburgh Festival, and a number of other festival appearances are planned in support of the book, including Hay, Kings Lynn and York. An experienced lecturer and Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, John will be promoting the book via a series of lectures, which were hugely successful during his Forgotten Footprints tour. He is also available for talks. The author has a number of national press contacts, and UK-wide press coverage is expected. He is based in west London. The book will include a number of maps, sketches and photographs taken by John which serve to illustrate his travels.

While recovering from cancer, John Harrison followed in the footsteps of Hernan Cortes - the man responsible for the fall of the Aztec Empire - for four months, exploring ruins which refute the popular image of the Aztecs and their neighbours as bloodthirsty savages, and discovering that the Spanish legacy is far darker than the Aztec one.When Hernan Cortes met the Mayans, Aztecs and other cultures of the gulf coast of Mexico in 1519, it was the first extended contact between the peoples of continental America and Europe. The Spanish found cities larger and better run than any in Europe, and pyramids greater than Egypt's. The Aztecs believed time was running down and they lived in the final age of the world. Many Spaniards believed Christ's millennium was approaching, and God's revelation of Americas had opened the final act: the conversion of the remote races of the earth. After the Day of Judgement God's experiment with man was over. The laboratory, the physical world, would be destroyed. Both cultures were acting out the last days. Halfway through researching this book John Harrison had a scan which told him he would not live to write it; he was seeing out his own days. The Aztec people were concerned with the transitory nature of worldly things; some of their rulers were revered as much for their philosophical poetry as their conquests. John Harrison follows Cortes's route along the Mexican coast and across country to modern Mexico City, home of the Aztecs.A journey within journeys to the end of time, the book becomes a meditation on time, on mortality and self, from a modern master of travel writing.