Rivers Run

LONGLISTED FOR THE INAUGURAL RICHARD JEFFERIES AWARD FOR NATURE WRITING ‘A master of the landscape and a celebration of a life lived with the wild’ – Dan Kieran, author of The Idle Traveller ‘[Parr] writes beautifully ... gentle, often elegiac ... There is much pleasure to be taken from this book’ - Tom Fort, Gamefisher ‘Yet, sitting here at the beginning of that journey, I realise there is a different path I must follow. This entails not a simple exploration of a single river, or the fish I might catch from it, but an understanding of what it is that makes someone an angler – what it is that makes me an angler. … Although I don’t always need a rod in my hand to feel as if I belong by the riverside, it was angling that helped open my eyes. And as I sit here, I can hear the river calling me, bubbling up from deep underground, sharing its secrets.’ From childhood memories of an Exmoor stream and of the Itchen during difficult teenage years, to finding solace on the banks of the Kennet and the catharsis of a storm on the Jurassic Coast, Rivers Run is a love letter from Kevin Parr to the rivers and waterways that shaped him. It is a book about fishing. But it’s also a book about living, surviving the difficult times and remembering to breathe. ‘A moving treatise on the way we deal with the dark things that life throws at us’ - BBC Countryfile magazine ‘I very much enjoyed this book ... thoughtful and interesting’ - Mark Avery, author of Inglorious