Is a River Alive?
From the bestselling 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 listeners 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.
1146119224
Is a River Alive?
From the bestselling 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 listeners 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.
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Is a River Alive?

Is a River Alive?

by Robert Macfarlane

Narrated by Robert Macfarlane

Unabridged — 10 hours, 40 minutes

Is a River Alive?

Is a River Alive?

by Robert Macfarlane

Narrated by Robert Macfarlane

Unabridged — 10 hours, 40 minutes

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Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Travel writing, ecological reporting and history flow together in a portrait of one of nature’s most powerful features.

From the bestselling 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 listeners 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.

Editorial Reviews

Booklist (starred review)

The arguments for nature’s rights, the drama of encounters, the crimes against rivers and all that they nurture, and the valor, genius, and uncanny gifts of eco-activists are all conveyed in gorgeously vibrant, fresh, and gripping language.”

Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Are rivers alive? Macfarlane delivers a lucid, memorable argument in the affirmative.”

Los Angeles Review of Books

Macfarlane places the reader in immersive contact with the nature we have been lulled and dulled into regarding as mere backdrop to human activity.”

Barnes&Noble.com

Travel writing, ecological reporting, and history flow together in a portrait of one of nature’s most powerful features.”

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

A lyrical inquiry into the implications of treating rivers as living beings worthy of reverence and legal rights.”

Earth Island Journal

A profound philosophical journey in the guise of wilderness derring-do.”

Merlin Sheldrake

"This book is a beautiful, wild exploration of an ancient idea: that rivers are living participants in a living world. Robert Macfarlane’s astonishing telling of the lives of three rivers reveals how these vital flow forms have the power not only to shape and reshape the planet, but also our thoughts, feelings, and worldviews. Is a River Alive? is a breathtaking work that speaks powerfully to this moment of crisis and transformation."

Los Angeles Review of Books - Ellen Wayland-Smith

"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."

Atlantic - Elizabeth Rush

"Macfarlane’s prose offers a glorious invitation to return to one’s child-mind and its inherent wonder. … Is a River Alive? illustrates what resistance to extraction can look like on the ground, and also what might be awakened in us when we begin to live with rivers, recognizing them as co-creators of our past, our present, and—more and more—our future."

NPR - Colin Dwyer

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

Atmos - Lewis Gordon

"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."

Guardian

"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."

Boston Globe - Clea Simon

"A profoundly beautiful and moving work."

Minnesota Star Tribune - Pamela Miller

"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."

Air Mail - Pico Iyer

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

4Columns - Mark Dery

"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."

Diane Ackerman

"Robert Macfarlane is one of earth’s keenest celebrants."

John Vaillant

"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."

Elizabeth Kolbert

"Like its subject, Is a River Alive? is work of flow and counter-flow. It is lyrical, evocative, closely observed, and deeply moving. Robert Macfarlane offers new ways to think and, just as importantly, feel about the majestic and mysterious non-human world."

Economist

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

Becca Rothfeld

"Is a River Alive? is a wide-ranging feat of reporting that wends between the waters of three disparate places … Macfarlane’s prose is vivid, sometimes even flowery … It is not just informative but frequently beautiful, full of luscious lines."

Los Angeles Times - Valorie Castellanos Clark

"As beautiful as the rivers and the hope he’s describing."

Philip Pullman

"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."

Science - Mary Ellen Hannibal

"Such is [Macfarlane's] literary ability that he largely delivers revelation in the end."

Jorie Graham

"Is a River Alive? is one of the best books I’ve read in a very long time—exciting, brilliantly comprehensive, mind-altering. In one of its many stunning moments, Macfarlane describes the myriad rivers trapped and buried under the concrete of our cities. ‘Daylighting’ occurs on those rare occasions when these ghost-rivers are dug out & released to the surface to feel the sun, to expand—majestic creatures—and spread life once again. To read this book is to feel your ghosted soul undergo such daylighting—metaphysical, political, emotional, linguistic. Any soul going dormant, any citizen going numb, will be revivified and propelled back to their essential core, where rage, wonder, and imagination intertwine, and a powerful hope for the earth arises. A spellbinding, life-changing work."

Andrea Wulf

"Robert Macfarlane is a magician with words. His writing is like a vortex … once caught, you’re pulled deeper and deeper with each page."

Amitav Ghosh

"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."

Rebecca Solnit

"This book is itself a river of poetic prose, an invitation to get onboard 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."

Elif Shafak

"A rich and visionary work of immense beauty. Robert Macfarlane is a memory keeper. What is broken in our societies, he mends with words. 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."

Donna Seaman

"The arguments for nature’s rights, the drama of [Macfarlane's] encounters, the crimes against rivers and all that they nurture, and the valor, genius, and uncanny gifts of eco-activists are all conveyed in gorgeously vibrant, fresh, and gripping language. The result is a ravishing and enlightening inquiry shaped by hydropoetics and a deeply considered commitment to rejuvenating, cherishing, and protecting rivers and all of nature."

Patrick Barkham

"Profound and playful, revelatory and realistic, intimate and epic, humble and absolutely huge—this supremely enjoyable masterpiece will change the world"

Travel Tomorrow - Camille Van Puymbroeck

"When a book’s title asks a question, you better answer it as an author. And Robert Macfarlane does so in style. He combines his love for nature with a swift pen, making readers aware of ecological problems while also allowing them a moment of literary joy."

Amy Jane Beer

"Shattering and sublime, Is a River Alive? offers a question, an answer, and perhaps the greatest challenge and opportunity of our times: to accept our place in the mesh of things and act accordingly in the interests of the whole"

Miguel Salazar and Laura Thompson

"What happens when rivers are considered living entities with rights? Macfarlane, a prolific nature writer, journeys to the polluted Ennore Creek in India, recounts activist efforts to conserve the Los Cedros River in Ecuador and kayaks along Canada’s Magpie River—officially recognized as 'a living, rights-bearing being'—in search of an answer. His resulting book is a lyrical hybrid narrative of travel, history and environmentalism."

The Guardian

"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."

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2025-03-08
The accomplished British nature writer turns to issues of environmental ethics in his latest exploration of the world.

In 1971, a law instructor asked a musing-out-loud question: Do trees have legal standing? His answer was widely mocked at the time, but it has gained in force: As Macfarlane chronicles here, Indigenous groups around the world are pressing “an idea that changes the world—the idea that a river is alive.” In the first major section of the book, Macfarlane travels to the Ecuadorian rainforest, where a river flows straight through a belt of gold and other mineral deposits that are, of course, much desired; his company on a long slog through the woods is a brilliant mycologist whose research projects have led not just to the discovery of a mushroom species that “would have first flourished on the supercontinent [of Gondwana] that formed over half a billion years ago,” but also to her proposing that fungi be considered a kingdom on a footing with flora and fauna. Other formidable activists figure in his next travels, to the great rivers of northern India, where, against the odds, some courts have lately been given to “shift Indian law away from anthropocentrism and towards something like ecological jurisprudence, underpinned by social justice.” The best part of the book, for those who enjoy outdoor thrills and spills, is Macfarlane’s third campaign, this one following a river in eastern Canada that, as has already happened to so many waterways there, is threatened to be impounded for hydroelectric power and other extractive uses. In delightfully eccentric company, and guided by the wisdom of an Indigenous woman who advises him to ask the river just one question, 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.

Are rivers alive? Macfarlane delivers a lucid, memorable argument in the affirmative.

Product Details

BN ID: 2940192885048
Publisher: HighBridge Company
Publication date: 05/20/2025
Edition description: Unabridged
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