Is a River Alive?

Reviews

"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." — Becca Rothfeld, Washington Post

"[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." — Olivia B. Waxman, Time

"This book is a beautiful, wild exploration of an ancient idea.… A breathtaking work that speaks powerfully to this moment of crisis and transformation." — Merlin Sheldrake, author of Entangled Life

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

"Lyrical, evocative, closely observed, and deeply moving." — Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction

"Few nature writers working today produce work with the unassuming elegance and undisguised wonder that are evident on Macfarlane's every page." — Colin Dwyer, NPR

"This book is so potent that I felt baptized by the flow of its prose-poetry. I, too, have been ‘rivered.’" — Robert M. Thorson, Wall Street Journal

"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." — Ellen Wayland-Smith, Los Angeles Review of Books

"A profoundly beautiful and moving work." — Clea Simon, Boston Globe

"What his brilliant colleague Richard Powers has done for trees and oceans, Robert Macfarlane here does for embattled waterways." — Pico Iyer, Air Mail

"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." — The New Yorker

"Macfarlane’s prose offers a glorious invitation to return to one’s child-mind and its inherent wonder." — Elizabeth Rush, Atlantic

"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." — Maria Popova, Marginalian

"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." — Pamela Miller, Minnesota Star Tribune

"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." — Mark Dery, 4Columns

"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." — Lewis Gordon, Atmos

"Such is [Macfarlane’s] literary ability that he largely delivers revelation in the end." — Mary Ellen Hannibal, Science

"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." — Kevin P. Donovan, Boston Review

"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." — Daegan Miller, Literary Hub

"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." — David Coupaud, Esquire

"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." — Jason Dove Mark, Earth Island Journal

"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." — Publishers Weekly, (starred review)

"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." — Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"A ravishing and enlightening inquiry shaped by hydropoetics and a deeply considered commitment to rejuvenating, cherishing, and protecting rivers and all of nature." — Booklist, starred review

"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." — Elif Shafak, author of There Are Rivers in the Sky

"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." — Amitav Ghosh, author of Sea of Poppies

"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." — John Vaillant, author of Fire Weather

"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." — Rebecca Solnit, author of Orwell’s Roses

"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." — Jorie Graham, author of To 2040

"Gorgeously written.… Original, sinuous, and often startling." — Jennifer Szalai, New York Times Book Review

"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." — Guardian

"Macfarlane ranges, compellingly, further afield than [James] Scott’s relatively academic study—not only geographically, but also intellectually and emotionally." — Andrew Robinson, Nature

"[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." — Seth Wenger, American Scientist

"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." — Anne Matthews, American Scholar

"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." — Thomas A. Ferro, Harvard Crimson

"Robert Macfarlane is one of earth’s keenest celebrants." — Diane Ackerman, author of The Zookeeper's Wife

"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." — Phillip Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials trilogy

"Robert Macfarlane is a magician with words. His writing is like a vortex…once caught, you’re pulled deeper and deeper with each page." — Andrea Wulf, author of The Invention of Nature