Life, Loss, and the Wisdom of Rivers

Olivia Laing, the British author who blends memoir with cultural criticism, walked the forty‑two‑mile length of the River Ouse from source to sea, tracing the waterway that once claimed Virginia Woolf. She recorded the trek in her new book, To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface, describing how the river’s shifting currents echoed her own feelings of loss and renewal. The Marginalian notes that Laing treats the river as both a literal landscape and a metaphor for time, recalling writers from Woolf to Borges as she follows the water through chalk valleys and mist‑laden banks. The book is listed in public library catalogs.

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