This hugely accomplished first book draws on local lore and history, a vast range of research and some soaring lyrical writing
Magical . . . 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 - PHILIP HOARE
Has a Sebaldian edge to it that lifts it out of memoir and biography and into something far more tantalizing and suggestive
Brave, distinctive, and deeply intelligent . . . The book has an intense, humming, cumulative effect
Olivia Laing joins the best nature writers . . . Laing is a brilliant wordsmith and this is a beautifully accomplished book
[A] beautifully written meditation on landscape and the effect on it, benign and destructive, of generations of human beings
Olivia Laing is a new and thoughtful voice in the tradition of W.G. Sebald. I confidently expect it to be listed in this year's favourite books
Daily Telegraph - Joan Bakewell
A gentle, wise and riddling book. Its prose, like the river it describes, flows intricately, unpredictably and often beautifully, carrying the fascinated reader onwards
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. 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.
The Times - Jane Wheatley
This hugely accomplished first book draws on local lore and history, a vast range of research and some soaring Lyrical writing
Sunday Times - Anthony Sattin
Wonderfully allusive...The book's subject and structure fuse pleasingly, weaving and meandering, pooling into biographical, mythical or historical backwaters
Arrestingly beautiful... This is an uplifting book, which not only develops into a work of considerable richness, but...expresses its message of hope with increasing lyricism and uncluttered simplicity
Evening Standard - Juliette Nicholson
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
The Skinny - Renee Rowland
Written with the lyrical beauty of poetry...this entertains informs and inspires in equal measure
A brave, distinctive, and deeply intelligent addition to that protean genre mixing nature, history and travel writing which is becoming one of the richest forms of contemporary British literature... There are passages of masterfully timed lyricism
Literary Review - ALEXANDRA HARRIS
[Laing] conveys vision and sensation with great clarift and vividness. ... Of Olivia Laing's prose, we could simply say that words have a way with her and that her delight in language is at one with her absorption in the living world
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 . . . By turns lyrical, melancholic and exultant, To the River just makes you want to follow Olivia Laing all the way to the sea.
Sunday Telegraph - Philip Hoare
Nature Writing is the new Rock 'n' Roll
A meditation, a drifting sequence of thoughts on time and change, on loss, love and meaning, on hell and happiness, geology and evolution, science and poetry
Beautifully written...A great read that will make you want to head to the Sussex countryside
A refreshing, and inspiring, real-life story ... Relive Laing's journey and you'll be inspired to get out into nature more often
Gorgeous, lyrical...a gentle, wise, observant book, both sparkling and mysterious. ... Laing's writing - sometimes clear, sometimes shifting and oblique, always appropriate to the tale she's telling - is a joy
Gorgeous, lyrical...a gentle, wise, observant book, both sparkling and mysterious. ... Laing's writing - sometimes clear, sometimes shifting and oblique, always appropriate to the tale she's telling - is a joy
Gorgeous, lyrical...a gentle, wise, observant book, both sparkling and mysterious. ... Laing's writing - sometimes clear, sometimes shifting and oblique, always appropriate to the tale she's telling - is a joy
Nature Writing is the new Rock 'n' Roll