To the River

By Olivia Laing,

Book cover of To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface

Book description

Over sixty years after Virginia Woolf drowned in the River Ouse, Olivia Laing set out one midsummer morning to walk its banks, from source to sea. Along the way, she explores the roles that rivers play in human lives, tracing their intricate flow through literature, mythology and folklore.

Lyrical and…

When you buy books, we may earn a commission that helps keep our lights on (or join the rebellion as a member).

Why read it?

1 author picked To the River as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

When I was young, I wanted to be Virginia Woolf. I read volumes of her letters, so many that the rhythms of her sentences seemed to infect my own mind.

Decades later, I decided I would rather have been her father, Leslie Stephen, author of The Playground of Europe— but only in his mountaineering days, before he succumbed to his now legendary fits of selfishness and pique.

Strangely enough, Olivia Laing manages to channel both father and daughter in her intensely ruminative ramble along the River Ouse, where Virginia drowned herself in 1941.

If you love To the River...

Ad

Book cover of Tap Dancing on Everest: A Young Doctor's Unlikely Adventure

Tap Dancing on Everest by Mimi Zieman,

Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.

The team attempts a new route up…

Want books like To the River?

Our community of 12,000+ authors has personally recommended 65 books like To the River.

Browse books like To the River

Book cover of Medieval Merchants: York, Beverley and Hull in the Later Middle Ages
Book cover of Isle of Dogs
Book cover of The Birth of Black America: The First African Americans and the Pursuit of Freedom at Jamestown

Share your top 3 reads of 2024!

And get a beautiful page showing off your 3 favorite reads.

2,007

readers submitted
so far, will you?

Ad

📚 If you like To the River, you might also like...

Book cover of Norman Mailer at 100: Conversations, Correlations, Confrontations

Norman Mailer at 100 by Robert J. Begiebing,

Winner of the Robert F. Lucid Award for Mailer Studies.

Celebrating Mailer's centenary and the seventy-fifth publication of The Naked and the Dead, the book illustrates how Mailer remains a provocative presence in American letters.

From the debates of the nation's founders, to the revolutionary traditions of western romanticism,…

Book cover of The Truth About Unringing Phones

The Truth About Unringing Phones by Lara Lillibridge,

When Lara was four years old, her father moved from Rochester, New York, to Anchorage, Alaska, a distance of over 4,000 miles. She spent her childhood chasing after him, flying a quarter of the way around the world to tug at the hem of his jacket.

Now that he is…

5 book lists we think you will like!

Interested in Virginia, presidential biography, and detectives?

Virginia 119 books
Detectives 3,162 books