From the celebrated writer, observer and naturalist Robert Macfarlane comes a brilliant, perspective-shifting new book – which answers a resounding “yes” to the question of its title.

At the heart of IS A RIVER ALIVE? is a single, transformative idea: that rivers are not mere matter for human use, but living beings – who should be recognized as such in both imagination and law. Macfarlane takes the reader on a mind-expanding global journey into the history, futures, people and places of this ancient, urgent concept.

Around the world, rivers are dying from pollution, drought and damming. But a powerful movement is also underway worldwide to recognise the lives and the rights of rivers, and to re-animate our relationships with these vast, mysterious presences whose landscapes we share. The young ‘Rights of Nature’ movement has lit up activists, artists, law-makers and politicians across six continents – and become a focus for revolutionary thinking about rivers in particular.

IS A RIVER ALIVE? flows like water from the mountains to the sea, over three major journeys. The first is to northern Ecuador where a miraculous cloud-forest and its rivers are threatened with destruction by gold-mining. The second is to the wounded rivers, creeks and lagoons of southern India, where a desperate battle to save the lives of these waterbodies is underway. The third is to north-eastern Quebec, where a spectacular wild river – the Mutehekau or Magpie – is being defended from death by damming in a river-rights campaign led by an extraordinary Innu poet and leader called Rita Mestokosho.

Braiding these journeys is the life-story of the fragile chalk-stream who rises a mile from Macfarlane’s house, and flows through his own years and days.

The book also travels vastly across time, tracing the rise and fall of ideas of the aliveness of rivers, forests and mountains: from the 4400-year-old Epic of Gilgamesh, through the early modern rise of rationalism, and on into our precarious Anthropocene future. Throughout, it is illuminated by the presence of other minds and voices, and other ways of being in and seeing the world.

Passionate, original and revelatory, IS A RIVER ALIVE? is at once Macfarlane’s most personal and most political book to date. It teems with fascinating ideas, unforgettable characters and stories – and the pin-sharp encounters with people and nature which have become his hallmark. Weaving cultural and natural history, reportage, travel- and nature-writing together with a glittering prose-poetry, in this new book Macfarlane continues to push at what ‘non-fiction’ is and can do.

IS A RIVER ALIVE? is at once a literary work of art, a rallying cry and a catalyst for change. It is a book that will open hearts, spark debates and challenge perspectives. It invites its readers radically to re-imagine not only rivers but also life itself. At the centre of this vital, beautiful book is the recognition that our fate flows with that of rivers – and always has.