Présentation de l'éditeur
To the River is the story of the Ouse, the Sussex river in which Virginia Woolf drowned in 1941. One midsummer week over sixty years later, Olivia Laing walked Woolf's river from source to sea. The result is a passionate investigation into how history resides in a landscape - and how ghosts never quite leave the places they love. Along the way, Laing explores the roles rivers play in human lives, tracing their intricate flow through literature and mythology alike. To the River excavates all sorts of stories from the Ouse's marshy banks, from the brutal Barons' War of the thirteenth century to the 'Dinosaur Hunters', the nineteenth-century amateur naturalists who first cracked the fossil code. Central among these ghosts is, of course, Virginia Woolf herself: her life, her writing and her watery death. Woolf is the most constant companion on Laing's journey, and To the River can be read in part as a biography of this extraordinary English writer, refracted back through the river she loved. But other writers float through these pages too - among them Iris Murdoch, Shakespeare, Homer and Kenneth Grahame, author of the riverside classic The Wind in the Willows. The result is a wonderfully discursive read - which interweaves biography, history, nature writing and memoir, driven by Laing's deep understanding of science and cultural history. It's a beautiful, lyrical work that marks the arrival of a major new writer.
Revue de presse
To The River is a gentle, wise and riddling book. Its prose, like the river it describes, flows intricately, unpredictably and often beautifully, carrying the fascinated reader onwards. --Robert Macfarlane
Nature Writing is the new Rock 'n' Roll. --The Times
In this richly descriptive book, Laing succeeds superbly in delineating our often fraught, but nevertheless enduring relationship with water. --Sunday Times
Beautifully written ... A great read that will make you want to head to the Sussex countryside. --Woman
A missive filled with erudite observations of the land and water in the heady in-breath of summer . . . its beauty and conclusions find a critical hold in both academic and emotive axes. --Skinny
A refreshing, and inspiring, real-life story ... Relive Laing's journey and you'll be inspired to get out into nature more often. --Psychologies
This is Laing's first book and, without wanting to sound too gushing her writing at its most sublime reminds me of Richard Mabey's nature prose and the poetry of Alice Oswald. Like these two, and John Clare before them, 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. --Times
A magical book . . . her dreamy prose evokes a modern Alice, an hallucinatory tale told with one hand trailing in cool green water, while she wishes out folklore and science, history and biography . . . There is real delight in this debut. 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, Sunday Telegraph
Arrestingly beautiful . . . This is an uplifting book, which not only develops into a work of considerable richness, but as the river reaches the open sea, expresses its message of hope with increasing lyricism and uncluttered simplicity. --Evening Standard
A gentle, wise, observant book, both sparkling and mysterious. In fluid, meditative prose . . . Laing describes not just what she sees but the parallel narratives of her inner life. . . Laing's writing is a joy. . . [she] has a gift for conjuring the loveliest of the countryside and the creatures that inhabit it, and in her hands, the changing land and riverscapes are imbued with wonders and filled with stories. --Metro
It's hard not to warm to Laing as a guide . . . The writing, at its best, is wonderfully allusive and precise . . . The book's subject and structure fuse pleasingly, weaving and meande
