Is a River Alive?

New York Times Bestseller and #1 Sunday Times (UK) Bestseller.

Shortlisted and longlisted for multiple major nature & nonfiction awards (2025 Banff Mountain Book Competition; 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction).

Is a River Alive? is a lyrical, deeply reflective work of travel writing and natural history in which Robert Macfarlane explores the idea of rivers as living beings — deserving of imagination, reverence, and even legal recognition.

The book traces three main river-journeys: from cloud forests and mountain streams in Ecuador, to polluted creeks and lagoons in India, and onward to wild rivers in Canada — each threatened by environmental degradation like mining, pollution, or dams.

Interwoven with these journeys is the author’s intimate relationship with a fragile local stream near his home — a memory stream whose changing flow mirrors broader ecological and existential questions.

Through rich, evocative prose, the book challenges readers to reconsider humanity’s relationship to waterways — suggesting rivers are not inert resources, but vibrant entities whose fate is intertwined with ours.

“As beautiful as the rivers — and the hope — he’s describing.” — Los Angeles Times

“A lyrical inquiry into the implications of treating rivers as living beings worthy of reverence and legal rights.” — NPR / Independent review