Is a River Alive?
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A #1 Sunday Times (UK) Bestseller
A New York Times "New Nonfiction to Read This Spring" Recommendation âĸ A Financial Times "Best Summer Book of 2025" âĸ A Guardian "Nonfiction to Look Forward To in 2025" Pick âĸ A Washington Post "Book to Watch For" in 2025
From the best-selling author of Underland and "the great nature writerâĻof this generation" (Wall Street Journal), a revelatory book that transforms how we imagine riversâand life itself.
Hailed in the New York Times as âa naturalist who can unfurl a sentence with the breathless ease of a master angler,â Robert Macfarlane brings his glittering style to a profound work of travel writing, reportage, and natural history. Is a River Alive? is a joyful, mind-expanding exploration of an ancient, urgent idea: that rivers are living beings who should be recognized as such in imagination and law.
Macfarlane takes readers on three unforgettable journeys teeming with extraordinary people, stories, and places: to the miraculous cloud-forests and mountain streams of Ecuador, to the wounded creeks and lagoons of India, and to the spectacular wild rivers of Canadaâimperiled respectively by mining, pollution, and dams. Braiding these journeys is the life story of the fragile chalk stream a mile from Macfarlaneâs house, a stream who flows through his own years and days.
Powered by dazzling prose and lit throughout by other minds and voices, Is a River Alive? will open hearts, challenge perspectives, and remind us that our fate flows with that of riversâand always has.
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Robert Macfarlane is internationally renowned for his writing on nature, people, and place. His best-selling books include Underland, Landmarks, The Old Ways, The Wild Places, and Mountains of the Mind; they have been translated into more than thirty languages, won many prizes around the world and been widely adapted for film, music, theatre, radio, and dance. He has also written operas, plays, and films including River and Mountain, both narrated by Willem Dafoe. He has collaborated with artists including Olafur Eliasson and Stanley Donwood, and with the artist Jackie Morris he co-created the internationally best-selling books of nature-poetry and art, The Lost Words and The Lost Spells. He is the recipient of the E. M. Forster Prize for Literature and the Henry David Thoreau Prize for Literary Excellence. Macfarlane lives in Cambridge, England, where he is a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
