In his most personal and political book, the award-winning Robert Macfarlane explores an ancient and crucial idea: rivers are not merely matter for human exploitation, but living entities, and as such must be recognized both in imagination and in law.

Traveling to places he describes with exquisite detail, he focuses on the people he meets, sketching portraits full of warmth, empathy, and political awareness. He begins in northern Ecuador, where a unique tropical forest and its rivers are threatened by mining, continues to the wounded rivers and lagoons of southern India, and ends in northeastern Quebec, where a movement for river rights fights to save the wild Mutehekau River from dams that would erase it.

With literary style, flowing prose, and fruitful reflections on how language can convey the "soul" of all that we have learned to consider inanimate, the famous author invites us to change the way we perceive nature, culture, and our place in the world.

AMONG THE BEST NON-FICTION BOOKS OF 2025

Lyrical, awakening, thorough, and deeply moving. Robert Macfarlane offers new ways to understand but mainly to feel the magnificent and mysterious world beyond humans.
Elizabeth Kolbert, author – Pulitzer Prize 2015

An excellent combination of travel narrative, history, and ecology.
New York Times

One of the major publishing events of the year […]. The book that will change readers' perspective.
Observer

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

As wonderful as the rivers and the hope it describes.
Los Angeles Times