Winner of the 2023 James Cropper Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing

On New Year’s Day, 2012, Amy-Jane Beer and a group of her best friends set out to kayak a small river in the Howgill Fells. One of those friends, Kate, didn’t come home leaving a devoted husband, a young daughter and a wide circle of friends bereft, bewildered and unmoored.

Years later, missing the emotional connection to the natural world she always felt when she was close to rivers, Amy-Jane decides to reignite her love of rivers. She starts tentatively and close to home and then visits rivers further afield that she knows well - the Tees, the Wharfe, the Conwy, and the Lune - before she feels able to move onto rivers she doesn’t know well, including the Tweed, the Parrett, the Otter and the Wye.

In this beautifully written nature narrative, Amy-Jane details her visits - sometimes alone, sometimes with others - to rivers of different types and character, exploring them in different ways including on foot, swimming, paddling, canyoning, and by canoe or kayak.

She explores river habitats and discovers species that live in or alongside rivers while she contemplates how our experiences of the natural world can help us deal with unexpected loss and cope with profound grief.