To the River A Journey Beneath the Surface
- 5 Oct 2017
- 9781786891587
- £12.99
- 304 pp
- 129×198mm
In a few words
An odyssey along the banks of the River Ouse, from source to sea, by the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Lonely City and Crudo
A beautifully written, elegant and subtle debut
A gentle, wise and riddling book
Robert Macfarlane
More about
the book
Over sixty years after Virginia Woolf drowned in the River Ouse, Olivia Laing set out one midsummer morning to walk its banks, from source to sea. Along the way, she explores the roles that rivers play in human lives, tracing their intricate flow through literature, mythology and folklore.
Lyrical and stirring, To the River is a passionate investigation into how history resides in a landscape – and how ghosts never quite leave the places they love.
Magical . . . By turns lyrical, melancholic and exultant, To the River just makes you want to follow Olivia Laing all the way to the sea
Philip Hoare
Daily TelegraphA beautifully written meditation on landscape
Wonderfully allusive . . . The book's subject and structure fuse pleasingly, weaving and meandering, pooling into biographical, mythical or historical backwaters
Without wanting to sound gushing, her writing at its sublime best reminds me of Richard Mabey's nature prose and the poetry of Alice Oswald . . . Laing seems to lack a layer of skin, rendering her susceptible to the smallest vibrations of the natural world as well as to the frailties of the human psyche
Olivia Laing
View profileOlivia Laing is an internationally acclaimed writer and critic. They’re the author of eight books, including Funny Weather, Everybody and the Sunday Times number one bestseller The Garden Against Time. Laing’s first novel, Crudo, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and in 2018 they were awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction. They’re an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Arts and their books have been translated into twenty-one languages. Their latest novel is The Silver Book.
@olivialanguage | olivialaing.com
