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.