Is a River Alive?

Everyone who has ever found something to love in a river should find something to love in this book. It is a masterpiece

Everyone who has ever found something to love in a river should find something to love in this book. It is a masterpiece

One of the big publishing events (if not the biggest) of 2025 – a new book by Robert Macfarlane . . . Personal as well as political, it’s almost as certain to shift readerly perspectives as it is to be a bestseller

The book is a delight . . . So stirring, so surprising, so acute

Is a River Alive? is a powerful synthesis of literature, activism and ethics, reshaping the way we perceive the natural world

Whether fiction or non-fiction, all great books make you look at the world anew – and Macfarlane’s has changed the way I think about the natural world. In it, he explores the idea that rivers are not objects or resources but living beings, and by the end, that idea feels self-evident . . . A lyrical, persuasive invitation to look again at how we treat the systems that sustain us – and one of the year’s most necessary books

The narrative pull is strong in this book. I kept wanting to go back to it. Macfarlane has yet again demonstrated his genius as an author in creating a book that is alive, that has personality, that talked to me. I was sad when it ended. It has flowed into my daily thoughts ever since, much like a river continues to flow into the sea

Beautiful, wild and wildly provocative

Macfarlane confronts the realities of the living, beating heart of the riverine world . . . With crystalline clarity and force, Macfarlane confronts the gross failure of our existing laws to protect rivers from harm . . . Such ideas are brought to life by the quality of the writing, the evocation of mood and place, the raw smells and energies that accompany Macfarlane, whether on a gentle walk into a Cambridge wood, or hurtling with mortal speed down a Canadian rapid

Impassioned and invigorating . . . Macfarlane is erudite and eclectic, and, though charismatic, doesn’t press his presence upon you. His books are adventurous, often involving truly remarkable companions; and at the sentence level no one could accuse him of painting by numbers . . .

Macfarlane is England’s best nature writer, and once again his prose sings, its rhythm mirroring the subject matter. It’s liquid (or riverine) – surging, eddying and magnificently alive

Robert Macfarlane's Sunday Times - and New York Times -bestselling books include Is a River Alive? , Underland , Landmarks , The Old Ways , The Wild Places and Mountains of the Mind , as well as a book-length prose-poem, Ness . His work has been translated into more than thirty languages, won prizes around the world, and been widely adapted for film, music, theatre, radio and dance. He has also written operas, plays, albums, choral works, and films including River and Mountain , both narrated by Willem Dafoe.

Macfarlane has collaborated closely with artists including Olafur Eliasson, and with the artist Jackie Morris he co-created the internationally bestselling books of nature-poetry and art, The Lost Words and The Lost Spells . In 2017, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the E.M. Forster Prize for Literature, and in 2023 in Toronto he was the inaugural winner of the Weston International Award for a body of work in the field of non-fiction. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and is presently working on a graphic novel re-telling of the Epic of Gilgamesh .

Macfarlane and Morris's latest project, The Book of Birds, will be published in May 2026.