One midsummer week, while suffering from a series of minor personal crises, Olivia Laing set out to walk the length of the Sussex Ouse, the river in which Virginia Woolf drowned herself in 1941. Woolf is the most constant of Laing’s walking companions, but along the meandering way we also meet with Shakespeare, Iris Murdoch, the 19th-century fossil hunters and Kenneth Grahame, whose The Wind in the Willows still stands as one of the great classics of riverine literature. Fittingly for a river that shares its name with several others in England, Laing’s Ouse comes to stand for rivers in general. She writes: ‘A river passing through a landscape catches the world and gives it back redoubled: a shifting, glinting world more mysterious than the one we customarily inhabit. Rivers run through our civilisations like strings through beads.’

Canongate | Paperback 304 pp. |ISBN: 9781847677938