To the River

A beautifully written, elegant and subtle debut * * Financial Times * * A gentle, wise and riddling book -- ROBERT MACFARLANE 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 Telegraph * * A beautifully written meditation on landscape * * The Sunday Times * * Wonderfully allusive . . . The book's subject and structure fuse pleasingly, weaving and meandering, pooling into biographical, mythical or historical backwaters * * Observer * * 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 * * The Times * * Has a Sebaldian edge to it that lifts it out of memoir and biography and into something far more tantalizing and suggestive * * Guardian * * This hugely accomplished first book draws on local lore and history, a vast range of research and some soaring lyrical writing * * Sunday Times * * Olivia Laing joins the best nature writers . . . Laing is a brilliant wordsmith and this is a beautifully accomplished book * * Independent * * Brave, distinctive, and deeply intelligent . . . The book has an intense, humming, cumulative effect * * Literary Review * *

Olivia Laing is the author of four acclaimed works of non-fiction, To the River (2011), The Trip to Echo Spring (2013), The Lonely City (2016) and Everybody (2021). Her first novel, Crudo, was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller and won the 2019 James Tait Memorial Prize. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 2018 was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction. Her work has been translated into 19 languages. Laing writes on art and culture for many publications, including the Guardian, Financial Times and New York Times. Her collected writing on art, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, was published in 2020. She lives in Suffolk. Instagram: @olivialanguage | olivialaing.com