A New York Times Bestseller
A #1 Sunday Times (UK) Bestseller
Finalist for the 2025 Banff Mountain Book Competition in Environmental Literature
Longlisted for the 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction
Named a Best Book of 2025 by The New Yorker, Economist, Guardian, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Kirkus Reviews, and Publishers Weekly • One of TIME’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2025 • One of NPR’s “Books We Love” for 2025 • One of Smithsonian Magazine’s Ten Best Science Books of 2025 • A Chicago Public Library Top 10 Favorite Book of 2025 • A Washington Post Notable Work of Nonfiction for 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.
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.