Is a River Alive?

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

Finalist for the 2025 Banff Mountain Book Competition in Environmental Literature
Longlisted for the 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction

Named a Best Book of 2025 by The New Yorker , Economist , Guardian , Minneapolis Star-Tribune , Kirkus Reviews , and Publishers Weekly • One of TIME 's 100 Must-Read Books of 2025 • One of NPR's "Books We Love" for 2025 • One of Smithsonian Magazine 's Ten Best Science Books of 2025 • A Chicago Public Library Top 10 Favorite Book of 2025 • A Washington Post Notable Work of Nonfiction for 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.

6 illustrations