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

Finalist for the 2025 Banff Mountain Book Competition in Environmental Literature

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.

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.

Booklist Reviews

*Starred Review* Rivers the world over were long revered as sacred beings, until industrialization reduced these lifelines to mere commodities as they were poisoned by toxic chemicals, dammed, and entombed beneath cities. The Rights of Nature movement seeks to restore our grasp of how essential rivers (as well as forests, mountains, and other natural entities) are to life on earth by reimagining them as alive and therefore possessing innate rights to live freely and healthily. To fully comprehend the profound implications of this restorative vision, British nature writer extraordinaire Macfarlane (Underland, 2019) traveled to an Ecuadorian cloud forest, the endangered waterways in Chennai, India, and a mighty river in Canada. In between chronicles of these revelatory, at times perilous expeditions, he visits his homeground touchpoint, a rare spring-fed chalk stream. Macfarlane combines natural and human history while recounting his adventures and profiling his guides in each region, exceptionally knowledgeable and courageous scientists and river defenders. The arguments for nature's rights, the drama of his 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. Copyright 2025 Booklist Reviews.