Is a River Alive? Audiobook By Robert Macfarlane cover art

Is a River Alive?

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Is a River Alive?

By: Robert Macfarlane
Narrated by: Robert Macfarlane
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Brought to you by Penguin.

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

At its heart 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. Is a River Alive? takes the listener on an exhilarating exploration of the past, present and futures of this ancient, urgent concept.

The book flows first to northern Ecuador, where a miraculous cloud-forest and its rivers are threatened by goldmining.

Then, to the wounded rivers, creeks and lagoons of southern India, where a desperate battle to save the lives of these waterbodies is under way.

And finally, 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.

At once Macfarlane’s most personal and most political book to date, Is a River Alive? will open hearts, spark debates and lead us to the revelation that our fate flows with that of rivers – and always has.

©2025 Robert Macfarlane (P)2025 Penguin Audio Climate Change Conservation Ecosystems & Habitats Environment Environmental Natural Resources Nature & Ecology Outdoors & Nature Politics & Government Public Policy Science Heartfelt

Critic reviews

A rich and visionary work of immense beauty. Macfarlane is a memory keeper. What is broken in our societies, he mends with words. Rarely does a book hold such power, passion, and poetry in its exploration of nature. Read this to feel inspired, moved, and ultimately, alive (Elif Shafak)
This book is a beautiful, wild exploration of an ancient idea: that rivers are living participants in a living world. Robert Macfarlane’s astonishing telling of the lives of three rivers reveals how these vital flow forms have the power not only to shape and reshape the planet, but also our thoughts, feelings, and worldviews. Is a River Alive? is a breathtaking work that speaks powerfully to this moment of crisis and transformation (Merlin Sheldrake)
This book is itself a river of poetic prose, an invitation to get onboard and float through the rapids of encounters with places and people, the eddies of ideas, to navigate the resurgence of Indigenous worldviews through three extraordinary journeys recounted with a vividness that lifts readers out of themselves and into these waterscapes. Read it for pleasure, read it for illumination, read it for confirmation that our world is changing in wonderful as well as terrible ways (Rebecca Solnit)
Profound and playful, revelatory and realistic, intimate and epic, humble and absolutely huge – this supremely enjoyable masterpiece will change the world (Patrick Barkham)
In answering this essential question of matter or life-force, Macfarlane has created a braided, roaring and brilliant book that is a true landmark in more-than-human writing . . . A personal and beautifully poetic polemic, this may be Macfarlane’s best book yet (Rob Cowen)
Shattering and sublime, Is a River Alive? offers a question, an answer, and perhaps the greatest challenge and opportunity of our times: to accept our place in the mesh of things and act accordingly in the interests of the whole (Amy Jane Beer)
Is A River Alive? is a beautifully written, poetic testament to the vitality of the Earth and the forms of politics that can be based upon that premise (Amitav Ghosh)
Robert Macfarlane is a once-in-a-generation virtuoso, and I don’t know when his kaleidoscopic language and world-expanding scholarship have been used to more potent effect than in this impassioned, resounding affirmative to the title’s urgent question (John Vaillant)
All stars
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As Audible listeners will know, not all authors are the best narrators of their own books, but you may confidently add engaged - and engaging - narration to author Robert Macfarlane’s list of talents. His eagerly-awaited Is A River Alive? adds another genre-breaking gift of non-fiction writing to his already critically and universally acclaimed treasure trove. Using vivid and breathtaking storytelling, Macfarlane offers a firsthand account of what it is to personally and scrupulously engage with this question, embedded as it is in both indigenous cosmologies and in the rising Rights Of Nature movement. As he points out, the much-vaunted rationalism of Western intellectual frameworks jibs against us embracing animist understandings. Yet, as he brings to life in his vivid prose, the very question Is A River Alive? reprises a very ancient and far more successful understanding of and way of being within the more-than-human natural world - one that offers a bridge between indigenous and mainstream attempts to protect, restore and simply acknowledge the life-sustaining centrality of our riverine eco-systems world-wide. In the course of exploring the very different states and possible fates of three rivers, Macfarlane, with his characteristically generous and collaborative vision, engages movingly – and often humourously - with an extraordinary band of unforgettable river defenders across the globe who are working with these rivers at the very source of the forces arraigned against them. Listen to this extraordinary book and feel all the waters within your own body rising in profound fellowship with your own river kin. On that note, I can lovingly name who my home rivers are here in South Africa – they are the great Crocodile and the great Elephant Rivers, arising in the Eastern highlands south of the great green greasy Limpopo - hello my kin!
Mary Ann Cullinan


A thoroughly engaging and brilliant read

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Inspiring and above all motivating. As a Canadian and as an Australian, I now appreciate to a much greater extent the beauty of those two lands and the threats we all face with climate change and the ecological destruction around us.

A brilliant, haunting, compelling journey

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