Is a River Alive?

A New York Times Bestseller
A #1 Sunday Times (UK) Bestseller

A New York Times "New Nonfiction to Read This Spring" Recommendation • A Financial Times "Best Summer Book of 2025" • A Guardian "Nonfiction to Look Forward To in 2025" Pick • A Washington Post "Book to Watch For" in 2025

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.

About the Author :
Robert Macfarlane’s best-selling books include Underland, The Old Ways, and Mountains of the Mind. With the artist Jackie Morris he is the coauthor of The Lost Words, The Lost Spells, and The Book of Birds. He is the recipient of the E. M. Forster Prize for Literature and the Henry David Thoreau Prize for Literary Excellence and is a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

Review :
"Is a River Alive? is a wide-ranging feat of reporting that wends between the waters of three disparate places.… It is not just informative but frequently beautiful, full of luscious lines." "[Macfarlane] lends his expertise to raise awareness about a part of nature that is often taken for granted. Readers see that while rivers can be easily wounded, they can also quickly heal—if given the right care." "This book is a beautiful, wild exploration of an ancient idea.… A breathtaking work that speaks powerfully to this moment of crisis and transformation." "Everyone who has ever found something to love in a river should find something to love in this book. It is a masterpiece." "Lyrical, evocative, closely observed, and deeply moving." "Few nature writers working today produce work with the unassuming elegance and undisguised wonder that are evident on Macfarlane's every page." "This book is so potent that I felt baptized by the flow of its prose-poetry. I, too, have been ‘rivered.’" "Haunting.… Macfarlane places the reader in immersive contact with the nature we have been lulled and dulled into regarding as mere backdrop to human activity." "A profoundly beautiful and moving work." "What his brilliant colleague Richard Powers has done for trees and oceans, Robert Macfarlane here does for embattled waterways." "Rivers in Ecuador, India, and Canada provide the settings for this elegant travelogue, which asks whether a natural entity, such as a river, can be regarded as a living thing." "Macfarlane’s prose offers a glorious invitation to return to one’s child-mind and its inherent wonder." "A portal of a book, lucid and luminous, hinged on something particular and urgent.… And then there are the rivers themselves, rendered in prose so incandescent it leaves you lit up for the inside, the world shimmering in the golden beam of this vast and generous mind." "Moving and beautiful.… If we’re lucky, we do not have to go far to find a stream or river to sit by. The revelations in this passionate book will make that quiet, common experience even more life-giving." "Running like a crosscurrent beneath Macfarlane’s passionate, activist storytelling is a bracingly new approach to nature writing. It swirls together a Mike Davis–level mastery of earth science [and] a Philip Larkin–esque ear for the music of sentences." "For all the book’s questing intellectualism, it is a primal, sensual, and frequently swashbuckling adventure.… Macfarlane deftly moves between political reportage, prose poetry, and cultural anthropology." "Such is [Macfarlane’s] literary ability that he largely delivers revelation in the end." "Composed equally of captivating nature writing and travelogue, Macfarlane’s book is an urgent call to recognize the extraordinary wealth in uncaptured rivers and to restore those which have been polluted, cemented, and dried beyond recognition." "Here, just on the lip of the river’s mouth, is the point—not rights, but language—toward which the whole book, toward which all of Macfarlane’s books have been flowing.… [H]is precise, first-person, metaphorically rich ekphrastic prose, the fresh way he bends verbs and sentences to fit the contours of the land argues against the strictly ideal, cultural construction of the world." "Macfarlane’s accessible, poetic descriptions will transport you along with him to rivers in Canada, India, and Ecuador.… The next time you set foot in nature, the sense of awe and reverence he crafts will be right there with you." "Is a River Alive? offers readers a profound philosophical journey in the guise of wilderness derring-do, the adventures rendered in a whitewater prose-poetry. Macfarlane loves to play with language, and he brings landscape to life by torquing adjectives and nouns into verbs." "A lyrical inquiry into the implications of treating rivers as living beings worthy of reverence and legal rights.… Macfarlane skillfully braids his immersive travel writing with illuminating historical background, all told in lithe prose. Nature lovers will be riveted." "Macfarlane travels through territory so rugged that ‘even the trout have portage trails,’ returning with hard-won wisdom about our evanescence and, one hopes, a river’s permanence and power to shape our lives for the better." "A ravishing and enlightening inquiry shaped by hydropoetics and a deeply considered commitment to rejuvenating, cherishing, and protecting rivers and all of nature." "A rich and visionary work of immense beauty. Rarely does a book hold such power, passion, and poetry in its exploration of nature. Read this to feel inspired, moved and, ultimately, alive with the world." "Is a River Alive? is a beautifully written, poetic testament to the vitality of the Earth and the forms of politics that can be based upon that premise." "Robert Macfarlane is a once-in-a-generation virtuoso, and I don’t know when his kaleidoscopic language and world-expanding scholarship have been used to more potent effect than in this impassioned, resounding affirmative to the title’s urgent question." "This book is itself a river of poetic prose, an invitation to get on board and float through the rapids of encounters with places and people, the eddies of ideas, to navigate the resurgence of Indigenous worldviews through three extraordinary journeys recounted with a vividness that lifts readers out of themselves and into these waterscapes. Read it for pleasure, read it for illumination, read it for confirmation that our world is changing in wonderful as well as terrible ways." "Is a River Alive? is one of the best books I’ve read in a very long time—exciting, brilliantly comprehensive, mind-altering.… A spellbinding, life-changing work." "Gorgeously written.… Original, sinuous, and often startling." "One of the big publishing events (if not the biggest) of 2025—a new book by Robert Macfarlane…Personal as well as political, Is a River Alive? is almost as certain to shift readerly perspectives as it is to be a bestseller." "Macfarlane ranges, compellingly, further afield than [James] Scott’s relatively academic study—not only geographically, but also intellectually and emotionally." "[Macfarlane] is a poet with an uncanny knack for surprising—yet surprisingly apt—metaphors.… His turns of phrase never feel distracting, but rather illuminating, inviting the reader to view both nature and ideas from new perspectives…Macfarlane helps us to envision a path towards the better." "Is a River Alive? draws on two marvelous currents in British letters, the hyperliterate adventurer (Tutira, The Road to Oxiana, The Living Mountain) and the place magics of Susan Cooper’s Thames Valley, L. M. Boston’s Green Knowe, and Algernon Blackwood’s chiller The Willows. Its language is bedazzled." "Robert Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive? is an effective book with a clear message.… Each chapter offers a crystallized, frozen glance of the animate, ever-changing rivers as they exist now, leaving readers with a profound understanding of their fragility and a resulting urge for their preservation." "Robert Macfarlane is one of earth’s keenest celebrants." "Robert Macfarlane’s writing reminds us of the astonishing variety of things you can see when you go at walking speed, and of how strange and rich the world is." "Robert Macfarlane is a magician with words. His writing is like a vortex…once caught, you’re pulled deeper and deeper with each page."