Amy-Jane Beer – The Flow

Description

WINNER OF THE 2023 JAMES CROPPER WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR NATURE WRITING

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.

‘Unparalleled.’ The Wainwright Prize

‘A true masterpiece.’ Time Literary Supplement

About the Author

Amy-Jane Beer is a biologist and writer. She has written more than 30 books about science and natural history including Cool Nature and The A-Z of Wildlife Watching. She has also edited a number of wildlife publications including Animals, Animals, Animals and Wildlife World magazine. The natural sciences have been a lifelong fascination for her, and her childhood enthusiasm was formalised at Royal Holloway University of London, where she graduated with a First Class Honours degree in Biology, then spent years squinting down a microscope and fretting over the welfare of a tank full of sea urchin larvae to earn a PhD.