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Riverwork
A lost river, a lost aunt, a found literary from the cult-favourite poet and author of The Baudelaire Fractal comes a glittering and erudite new novel of Paris.
Some ruins are invisible.
Under the pavements of Paris there lies buried an ancient river, the Bièvre. For years, our narrator has walked along these streets, unaware of the water and history under her feet, on her way to clean the apartments of Paris’s academic class. As she begins to study and transcribe the inherited notebooks and papers of her great-aunt, a teacher and researcher who disappeared years earlier, she commits to continuing her aunt’s youthful research on the Bièvre, mining the river’s documentary traces in the works of Rousseau, Rabelais, Hugo, Chateaubriand, and the like. She uncovers a history of paper mills, dyeing workshops, tanneries, and textile manufacturers – and laundries.
She finds resonances of her own labour in the history of the river’s laundresses. On stolen time at work, and in her insomniac hours of nightwriting, she fills notebooks with these woven stories and descriptions of obsolete sites, textiles, cosmologies, and voices, constructing her own forms of relation with the lost.
Riverwork unearths not just an urban river but also a philosophy of research and the archive, a politics of hydrology, an ontology of aging and belatedness, and a consideration of the unrepresented labour of women, past and present. Along the way it brings to life, in pyrotechnic prose, a long-gone Paris and both its domestic workers and its writers.
Some ruins are invisible.
Under the pavements of Paris there lies buried an ancient river, the Bièvre. For years, our narrator has walked along these streets, unaware of the water and history under her feet, on her way to clean the apartments of Paris’s academic class. As she begins to study and transcribe the inherited notebooks and papers of her great-aunt, a teacher and researcher who disappeared years earlier, she commits to continuing her aunt’s youthful research on the Bièvre, mining the river’s documentary traces in the works of Rousseau, Rabelais, Hugo, Chateaubriand, and the like. She uncovers a history of paper mills, dyeing workshops, tanneries, and textile manufacturers – and laundries.
She finds resonances of her own labour in the history of the river’s laundresses. On stolen time at work, and in her insomniac hours of nightwriting, she fills notebooks with these woven stories and descriptions of obsolete sites, textiles, cosmologies, and voices, constructing her own forms of relation with the lost.
Riverwork unearths not just an urban river but also a philosophy of research and the archive, a politics of hydrology, an ontology of aging and belatedness, and a consideration of the unrepresented labour of women, past and present. Along the way it brings to life, in pyrotechnic prose, a long-gone Paris and both its domestic workers and its writers.
240 pages, Paperback
Published May 5, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Unfortunately, this book was not for me. The quotes at the beginning of the chapters kept removing me from the work itself. I found it hard to keep engaged. I think this book will find its audience, given how beautiful the writing itself is, but I was too taken out of it to enjoy that.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
The most delightful wander through almost lost histories. Lisa’s prose is a river I don’t want to stop swimming inside of!
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews