Time Among the Maya

This is at once a riveting journey, written with wit and wisdom, but also a study of a civilisation.

The Maya of Central America created one of the most dazzling civilisations on this earth, which is often compared to Ancient Greece. The Maya had a delight in creation, expressed in art, architecture, pottery, astronomy, mathematics and mythology, all combined with a deep, metaphysical fascination with time. This civilisation seems to have collapsed in the ninth century, some five hundred years before the Spanish conquest of America.

Ronald Wright travelled through the old territories of the Maya (the jungles and mountains of Guatemala, Belize and Mexico) to explore the ancient roots of their culture and to map out what has survived. Despite civil wars and centuries of oppression by Hispanic, then Mestizo culture, he discovers a region where seven million people still speak Mayan languages and struggle to maintain their resilient, indigenous culture.

About the Author

Ronald Wright is the author of ten books of fiction, history, essays and travel published in eighteen languages and more than forty countries. His first novel, A Scientific Romance, won Britan's David Higham Prize for Fiction and was chosen as a book of the year by the Sunday Times and the New York Times. Wright's CBC Massey Lectures, A Short History of Progress, won the Libris Award for Nonfiction Book of the Year and inspired Martin Scorsese's 2011 documentary film Surviving Progress. His other bestsellers include Time Among the Maya and Stolen Continents, chosen as a book of the year by the Independent and the Sunday Times. His latest work is The Gold Eaters, a novel set during the Spanish invasion of the Inca Empire. Born in England to British and Canadian parents, Wright lives on Canada's west coast.