The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus

7 October 2025

Territory Rights — Worldwide.

Description

A gifted historian presents a definitive book on Christopher Columbus—his life, his legacy and the many controversies that outlived him

Christopher Columbus, the Genoese navigator once considered a hero, is now blamed for bringing plunder and genocide to the Americas. In The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus, Matthew Restall takes us beyond polemic, sifting through the evidence across nations, languages and five centuries to explore the central questions of Columbiana. He demonstrates that we know a great deal about Columbus’s life and that Columbus was not as remarkable as many have assumed—or as he himself believed. But his afterlives are another story: Restall narrates the international contest over Columbus’s bones and the dozens of claims on his birthplace, examines how he became a hero and more. The result is a kaleidoscopic account of a single man that becomes a new history of the modern world.

Reviews

"The celebrated historian Restall takes on Columbus’s ever-shifting legacy — from seafaring hero to colonialist villain to inept functionary and everything in between — and gets at the flesh-and-blood man behind the centuries of messaging." — The New York Times

"[E]ntertaining and unpredictable . . . surprising and significant . . . The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus offers some key interventions. One is to restore Columbus to his proper dimension. . . . Restall is, amazingly, able to say something new and interesting about a figure for whom everything had seemingly been said already." — Andrés Reséndez, The New York Times Book Review

"The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus is thoroughly compelling and scrupulously faithful to the sources. In tune with the author’s other books, it is also extremely entertaining." — Fernando Cervantes, The Times Literary Supplement

Hardback

9781324086932

160 x 236 mm • 368 pages

£27.00

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Ebook

9781324086949

£25.64

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