28-04-2025
Robert Macfarlane takes an epic trip down three great rivers
A new book from Robert Macfarlane is a literary event. A Cambridge professor and bestselling author, he is the grand panjandrum of British nature writing. In a suite of adventurous, poetic and thoughtful books, he has roamed and probed the landscape, from mountains (Mountains of the Mind) and the wilderness (The Wild Places) to ancient pathways (The Old Ways) and subterranean spaces (Underland).
Now he has turned to rivers. Is a River Alive? recounts three short but eventful journeys to the Ecuadorian cloud forest, to the waterways of Chennai in southeast India and to the Mutehekau Shipu, a whitewater river in Quebec, Canada, where things nearly go epically wrong. Between each trip he makes a small pilgrimage,
