Overview

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.

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9781982664077

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Laing's language is supple and saturated, bright and dappled in this gracefully meandering river of words and deeply pleasurable journey across Woolf's tidal world and the many-storied English countryside. -- Booklist By turns lyrical, melancholic and exultant, To the River just makes you want to follow Olivia Laing all the way to the sea. -- Daily Telegraph (London) A beautifully written meditation on landscape. -- Sunday Times (London) Olivia Laing joins the best nature writers...Laing is a brilliant wordsmith and this is a beautifully accomplished book. -- Independent (London)

Laing's language is supple and saturated, bright and dappled in this gracefully meandering river of words and deeply pleasurable journey across Woolf's tidal world and the many-storied English countryside. -- Booklist By turns lyrical, melancholic and exultant, To the River just makes you want to follow Olivia Laing all the way to the sea. -- Daily Telegraph (London) Olivia Laing joins the best nature writers...Laing is a brilliant wordsmith and this is a beautifully accomplished book. -- Independent (London) A beautifully written meditation on landscape. -- Sunday Times (London)

Olivia Laing joins the best nature writers...Laing is a brilliant wordsmith and this is a beautifully accomplished book. -- Independent (London) A beautifully written meditation on landscape. -- Sunday Times (London)

Author Information

Olivia Laing is a widely acclaimed writer and critic. Her work appears in numerous publications, including the Guardian, Observer, New Statesman, Frieze, and New York Times. She's a Yaddo and MacDowell Fellow and was 2014 Eccles Writer in Residence at the British Library. Her first book, To the River, was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Dolman Travel Book of the Year. The Trip to Echo Spring was shortlisted for the 2013 Costa Biography Award and the 2014 Gordon Burn Prize. The Lonely City has been shortlisted for the 2016 Gordon Burn Prize. She lives in Cambridge. www.OliviaLaing.co.uk. Follow @OliviaLanguage on Twitter. Kate Reading has been a freelance narrator for over twenty years. She received an Audie Award for Bellwether by Connie Willis and for Breasts by Florence Williams; an Audie nomination for The Gathering Storm by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson, recorded with her husband, Michael Kramer; and an Audie nomination for Blow Fly by Patricia Cornwell. She has also received numerous Earphones Awards from AudioFile magazine, which has named her Narrator of the Year and, for two years running, Best Voice in Science Fiction and Fantasy for her narration of Jim Butcher's Codex Alera series. As Jennifer Mendenhall, she has worked as a stage actor in the Washington, D.C., area and has been a member of the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company since 1987. Her work onstage has been recognized by the Helen Hayes Awards Society, the Washington Theatre Lobby Awards, and the Carbonell Awards in Florida. She and her husband live in Hyattsville, Maryland, with their two children.

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