A visit to the rapid where she lost a cherished friend unexpectedly reignites Amy-Jane Beer's love of rivers setting her on a journey of natural, cultural and emotional discovery. On New Year's Day 2012, Amy-Jane Beer's beloved friend Kate set out with a group of others to kayak the River Rawthey in Cumbria. Kate never came home, and her death left her devoted family and friends bereft and unmoored. Returning to visit the Rawthey years later, Amy realises how much she misses the connection to the natural world she always felt when on or close to rivers, and so begins a new phase of exploration. The Flow is a book about water, and, like water, it meanders, cascades and percolates through many lives, landscapes and stories. From West Country torrents to Levels and Fens, rocky Welsh canyons, the salmon highways of Scotland and the chalk rivers of the Yorkshire Wolds, Amy-Jane follows springs, streams and rivers to explore tributary themes of wildness and wonder, loss and healing, mythology and history, cyclicity and transformation. Threading together places and voices from across Britain, The Flow is a profound, immersive exploration of our personal and ecological place in nature.
Title: The Flow: Rivers, Water and Wildness
Author: Beer, Amy-Jane
ISBN: 9781472977397
Binding:
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Publication Date: 2022-08-04
Number of Pages: 400
Weight: 0.4537 kg
The perfect commingling of deep research with sparkling observation and quiet eddies of feeling, helmed by a lifelong kayaker, biologist and all-round adventurous soul... small wonder The Flow is such a knockout. I loved it. * Melissa Harrison, author of All Among the Barley *
A quietly courageous, open-hearted exploration of Britain's becks, bourns and streams. * Patrick Barkham, author of The Butterfly Isles *
Lyrical, wholehearted and wise, The Flow is a hymn for the rivers of Britain. * Lee Schofield, author of Wild Fell *
Honest, raw and moving, Amy's prose is as captivating as the rivers she describes. I thought I knew what rivers were, but this stunning book is a powerful reminder of their infinity, their mystery, and their bewildering complexity. * Sophie Pavelle, author of Forget Me Not *
The Flow moves deftly between deeply touching personal experience and carefully-researched erudition. It is a book of wit, of wonder and of wisdom. * Nick Acheson, naturalist and conservationist *
The Flow is an extraordinary book by an extraordinary author. * Chris Jones, conservationist and farmer *
A gutsy biologist with webbed feet, Amy-Jane Beer plunges the reader into rivers the length and breadth of Britain. We emerge bathed in wonder and full of fresh understanding. * Derek Niemann, author of Birds in a Cage *
Part memoir, part celebration of the many rivers and waters of Britain, The Flow is passionately alive - a work of tremendous range and scope by one of our finest writers about the living world. * Caspar Henderson, author of The Book of Barely Imagined Beings *
The Flow is a tour de force: blending crystal-clear prose with mythic poetry and a cascade of lucid facts, washed down with uplifting insights into life, death and the water that sustains us. * Guy Shrubsole, author of Who Owns England? *
Haunted by loss, The Flow is about the urgency of a life, land and love. * Nicola Chester, author of On Gallows Down *
From the incredibly moving opening scene, to a delightful conclusion, Amy-Jane Beer takes us on a journey on, in and through the waterways of Britain, in sparkling prose. A worthy successor to Roger Deakin's Waterlog. * Stephen Moss, author of The Robin *
The Flow is a wonderful book: as passionate as it is knowledgeable. From Yorkshire Derwent to Dart to Dee via the Zanskar, Amy-Jane Beer really does take us, in her phrase, 'as close as we might ever get to being a river'. * Mark Wormald, author of The Catch *
With a poet's gift for description, Beer makes her global travels vivid [...] She's got an ability to make even a small moment resonate, such as her child's serendipitous discovery of a carnivorous sundew plant, with sharp prose and quick pacing. The result is an aquatic tour de force. * Publishers Weekly *
Beer's book examines the reverential place rivers hold in our culture and the stories hidden in their depths. -- Joe Shute * The Sunday Telegraph *
I have read dozens of books about rivers and The Flow is one of the finest. -- David Profumo * Country Life *