Is a River Alive?
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4.2 • 22 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
From the best-selling author of Underland and "the great nature writer…of this generation" (Wall Street Journal), a revelatory book that transforms how we imagine rivers—and life itself.
"As beautiful as the rivers and the hope he’s describing." —Valorie Castellanos Clark, Los Angeles Times
A New York Times Bestseller
Winner of the 2026 Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award
Winner of the 2026 Nautilus Book Award
Shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize
Special Jury Citation for the Banff Mountain Books Prize
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, Economist, Guardian, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Kirkus Reviews, and Publishers Weekly • A Time Must-Read Book • One of NPR’s "Books We Love" • A Washington Post Notable Work of Nonfiction
Hailed in the New York Times as “a naturalist who can unfurl a sentence with the breathless ease of a master angler,” 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 Canada—imperiled respectively by mining, pollution, and dams. Braiding these journeys is the life story of the fragile chalk stream a mile from Macfarlane’s 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 rivers—and always has.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
A river can flood, feed, vanish, or remember. In naturalist Robert Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive?, it can also speak, if we’re willing to listen. Blending travel writing, environmental history, and quiet personal reflection, Macfarlane journeys from cloud forest to coastline, tracing how different communities are reimagining rivers not as resources but as living beings with rights. Each journey is rooted in landscape and shaped by the people who risk everything to protect what flows through it. Alongside these global stories, Macfarlane returns often to a chalk stream near his own home, threading the political with the personal as he reflects on time, belonging, and ecological care. His prose moves with clarity and depth, inviting readers to see rivers as fellow travelers in our shared world. Is a River Alive? is both a plea and a promise that we might listen more closely, and live more wisely, in a world where everything that flows is trying to speak.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nature writer Macfarlane (Underland) serves up a lyrical inquiry into the implications of treating rivers as living beings worthy of reverence and legal rights. Recounting his travels along the Río Los Cedros in Ecuador, Macfarlane profiles the dogged conservationists defending the river from logging and mining interests, and discusses how their activism secured the inclusion of legal protections for the natural world in the country's most recent constitution, ratified in 2008. He weaves together his recollections of kayaking Canada's Magpie River with an account of how Indigenous resistance to hydroelectric development successfully prevented the river's damming and led a municipal government to recognize it as "a living, rights-bearing being" in 2021. The fate of Ennore Creek—an offshoot of the Kosasthalaiyar River in Chennai, India—serves as a cautionary tale of what happens when rivers aren't protected, Macfarlane suggests, describing how British colonial zoning practices concentrated polluting industries on the city's outskirts where the water still flows "grey-green and sluggish... slick with effluents, sewage and other pollutants." Macfarlane skillfully braids his immersive travel writing with illuminating historical background, all told in lithe prose ("The horizon widens into ocean and the co-motion of sky and water is lost in a white, grainy light, and there the river's last trace is slow-vanishing spirals in the water, shallowing as they slip on"). Nature lovers will be riveted.
