To the River ─ A Journey Beneath the Surface

Over sixty years after Virginia Woolf drowned in the River Ouse, Olivia Laing sets out to walk its banks, from the source all the way to the sea. As she walks, she reflects upon the power of rivers, refracting mythology, science, social history and literature through their waters to shed light on their eternal violence and mystery.

Lyrical and stirring, To the River is a meditation on landscape and its capacity to restore hope - and how ghosts never really leave the places they love.

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. To the River was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Dolman Travel Book of the Year. Her second book, The Trip to Echo Spring was shortlisted for the 2013 Costa Biography Award and the 2014 Gordon Burn Prize, and The Lonely City has been shortlisted for the 2016 Gordon Burn Prize. She lives in Cambridge.