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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
First published May 5, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
May 25, 2026
Riverwork felt like a book that quietly dripped into the gaps of my own thinking: slow, insistent sentences and Lucy’s ‘hag’ body kept offering me new ways to inhabit my own, and to see how women’s lives, work, and archives are submerged and re‑surfaced. I read it in a kind of lucid, feminist drift—next to kids watching TV, in parking lots, wandering the house, in a bath (and I never take baths). I felt like this novel prescribed a kind of wandering while reading. Robertson traces a vanished great‑aunt and the buried Bièvre River through old notebooks, dust, textile history, and the city’s plumbing. The pacing felt superb to me because it never forces urgency; instead it trusts that thought can meander and still arrive somewhere piercing. The writing is deeply soothing. It refuses the pressure to resolve—women disappear, rivers are covered, archives rot—and yet this minor, stubborn work: describing, copying, paying attention to the margins, is the riverwork of writing at its finest and most poignant (to me).
June 4, 2026
I feel really lucky to have gone to Lisa Robertson’s book launch for Riverwork. The conversation shared between her and two professors was so engaging and hearing her read her own words was a privilege. I love the interwovenness of experience and thought in her work. The writing was beautiful. I feel like I’ll come back to this
July 10, 2026
Yeah, this is exactly what I’m looking for. Chose this book as my companion for my first trip to Paris and it was perfect. Ended up reading it so slowly to linger over every delicious sentence that it was read in Paris, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Inverness, New York City, and inbetween.
May 21, 2026
DEMANDING but unlike anything else? Lisa is cooking in ways we can’t even imagine…
July 3, 2026
Didn't expect something that flirts between fiction and non-fiction so much for this one, so anti-narrative that it becomes almost essayistic at times. It's a super fragmented and polyphonic book where the narrator investigates the notes left by a great aunt and meditates on what it means to disappear, especially through the prism of the laundresses working on tanneries in a now disappeared river, but so much is braided around: her obsession with French authors, reflections about her aging body, tidbits of her work as a maid for a former archivist, and more tangents. It coats the entire book with a meditative layer, like an ambling mind going off route with no task on the agenda; it forces you to slow down to absorb these tangents and to be "contaminated" bits by bits by the narrator, her insomnia, her obsessions, her consciousness, and her failing quest to give a voice to vanished women of decades or centuries ago.
I found it at its strongest when it explores the collective disappearance of women and their labor, invisibilized and half-forgotten; but the most impatient parts of me found it a little inert, too comfortable in its haute-voltige intellectuality, and too dense in its references.
I found it at its strongest when it explores the collective disappearance of women and their labor, invisibilized and half-forgotten; but the most impatient parts of me found it a little inert, too comfortable in its haute-voltige intellectuality, and too dense in its references.
July 9, 2026
Lisa Robertson taught me how to savour words - I wish I kept an index whilst reading like Lucy does. Particularly enjoyable as many parts of this book are of great interest: dust, archives, lateness, style, textiles, histories of labour, and of bodies of water.
June 14, 2026
fucking masterpiece ofc
May 25, 2026
Devoured this in a day … can’t believe I had never read Lisa Robertson before this week I am forever changed
July 14, 2026
She may have done something I thought no one could do…….4 stars instead of5 for being a little affected. PS she is posting about Renee Gladman on instagram
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June 22, 2026hard to describe how meaningful this book was to me but i'll try later. in the form of a metafictional short story. it felt like lisa robertson was reading the insides of my brain and also the insides of my friends' brains and the trail mix we ate on the porch and also the lint on the ground. i feel like the girl in the baudelaire fractal like im convinced i wrote this book. but im not hubristic. i could never
June 30, 2026
I first came across Lisa Robertson as a poet – back when I read a lot of poetry – and I was impressed by her intelligence and quirky, colourful use of language. Reading Riverwork, her second novel, is just as impressive, but it is not easy. At the beginning, especially, her prose is dense, complex and deeply thoughtful, but also needlessly (I thought) self-referential, often reminding me of the work of French cultural critics such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Michel Houellebecq. You do not race through it. But the prose becomes less challenging, though still dense, complex and thoughtful, after 60 or so pages, and is well worth working through to get to the meat of the book. The narrator is Lucy Frost, a self-described "hag" in her 60s, Canadian-born but a long-time resident of Paris, where she cleans the homes of academics and intellectuals, especially the residence of an older woman she calls "the archivist," who is slowly, permanently engaged in sorting through the documents and correspondence of her life. Lucy herself is engaged in a smaller-scale archival task: Sorting and understanding the notebooks and photographs left behind by her great aunt Em, who disappeared years before and was never seen again. Em was engaged in the study of the river Bièvre, which used to flow through Paris carrying the stinking outflow of tanneries, dye shops and laundries, as well as huge quantities of human waste, until is was paved over in 1912. Lucy herself, a failed writer, is engaged in the study of Chateaubriand, Rousseau and a host of other French literati and filmmakers of the past (and present), as well as the life of the Archivist, the laundresses of the Bièvre and her own family in Canada. There is no plot, per se, and Robertson, through Lucy, makes it clear there will be no proper "story." But I still found myself compelled to read on, and I was glad I did, though I'm not sure I'd recommend the novel to most of my friends or family. As for me, I'm now going to read something simple and straightforward, though I'll probably be thinking about the Bièvre while I do it.
June 9, 2026
A heady, challenging blend of philosophy, poetry and prose. Robertson chooses some truly impenetrable chapter epigraphs, but the way I decided to read this was to pause (as she recommends) to savor the wise and astounding parts, and to let the rest wash through me.
And FTR, I have read the C.K. Scott Moncrieff translation of that big 'ole book, all the way through. But I’m not quite enough to understand all of Robertson (this is a book to make a study of). So I’ll just drop some of my takeaways in quotes. Maybe the detritus will accumulate as intelligence.
"Sleep tastes or sips clandestinely but lustily from everything abandoned."
"The half-concealed river’s heroines were the laundress, the female insurgent, the factory weaver, the domestic servant, precisely the historical types that animated the Paris of my aunt."
"My aunt noted that the city’s attempts to banish its laundresses from the river were the fist steps in the suppression of the river itself. Their voices went underground with the river."
"Proust had learned a mode of textile composition from his maid, who had become his collaborator. His grand book was more mended or darned than written, each thread or cloth recuperated from an earlier garment before being woven through the gaps and abrasions in the text, and then again recut, resewn, its form as well as its surfaces changed by Celeste’s techniques."
"It was a time when the term schizophrenia was punitively attached to women outside or beyond supposed social use: menopause, depression, anger, poverty, lesbianism, and eccentricity were among its textbook traits."
"It’s a received truth that we can’t return to the past, but the logic of this statement rests on a linear conception of time."
"And yet, Chateaubriand said, whomsoever he loved was never buried, but continued to live in the air around him. Death, he said, does not destroy us by touching us; it only renders us invisible."
And FTR, I have read the C.K. Scott Moncrieff translation of that big 'ole book, all the way through. But I’m not quite enough to understand all of Robertson (this is a book to make a study of). So I’ll just drop some of my takeaways in quotes. Maybe the detritus will accumulate as intelligence.
"Sleep tastes or sips clandestinely but lustily from everything abandoned."
"The half-concealed river’s heroines were the laundress, the female insurgent, the factory weaver, the domestic servant, precisely the historical types that animated the Paris of my aunt."
"My aunt noted that the city’s attempts to banish its laundresses from the river were the fist steps in the suppression of the river itself. Their voices went underground with the river."
"Proust had learned a mode of textile composition from his maid, who had become his collaborator. His grand book was more mended or darned than written, each thread or cloth recuperated from an earlier garment before being woven through the gaps and abrasions in the text, and then again recut, resewn, its form as well as its surfaces changed by Celeste’s techniques."
"It was a time when the term schizophrenia was punitively attached to women outside or beyond supposed social use: menopause, depression, anger, poverty, lesbianism, and eccentricity were among its textbook traits."
"It’s a received truth that we can’t return to the past, but the logic of this statement rests on a linear conception of time."
"And yet, Chateaubriand said, whomsoever he loved was never buried, but continued to live in the air around him. Death, he said, does not destroy us by touching us; it only renders us invisible."
July 13, 2026
This won't be for everyone, but I adored it. Lucy Frost is a housecleaner by day and a writer by night, who relentlessly pursues her great-aunt's obsession with Paris' Bièvre river, which in this version of history disappeared underground in 1912 after centuries of diversion and pollution. Her great-aunt disappeared to France long ago and Lucy has inherited her archives, and becomes determined to continue the research her great-aunt started. The product is a philosophical treatise on the lost stories of women's labor, bringing back to life the silenced voices of the Bièvre's laundresses of centuries past. It's strange and meandering, but it had me underlining on almost every page. Thanks to the owner of Chicago's Exile in Bookville for recommending this book.
Favorite quotes:
"... lost time abruptly blooms, as in an archive the researcher can be infected by the spores of an ancient illness, long held captive among the decomposing papers, newly released by the dust of her riffling."
"Belated, insomniac, and underemployed, a reader and a weeper, a scoffer and a scrawler, a cleaner, a fibber, and a sipper, a doubter, a haunter of shame, I am a hag, yes; I am a riverologist."
"Memory is both topographic and cellular; the city existed in her body as it exists in mine."
"There's an absent river in every city."
Favorite quotes:
"... lost time abruptly blooms, as in an archive the researcher can be infected by the spores of an ancient illness, long held captive among the decomposing papers, newly released by the dust of her riffling."
"Belated, insomniac, and underemployed, a reader and a weeper, a scoffer and a scrawler, a cleaner, a fibber, and a sipper, a doubter, a haunter of shame, I am a hag, yes; I am a riverologist."
"Memory is both topographic and cellular; the city existed in her body as it exists in mine."
"There's an absent river in every city."
July 13, 2026
This is not the book the reviews said it would be. It is a book about a disappeared river in Paris, sure. But not really - “The perceptual ‘something’ is always in the middle of something else.” And that ”something else” is Lucy Frost, a wannabe writer who is also 63 and a house cleaner who is mourning her long-disappeared great-aunt who knew a Paris she wishes she was part of. “Inside these rooms I wake up at 4:30 a.m. to construct sentences about waking up at 4:30 a.m.”
So what a the “work” of this book?
“Honestly, most of what gets called work is fuckery. To escape work or to escape into work or to escape sex to escape into lust, to make it work, to work at sex or to eroticize work, to be exhausted and to go on, to dally, to do all this outside credibility – the parts of working that are not working and the kinds of searching that are outside credibility, outside viability, are my topic.”
So what a the “work” of this book?
“Honestly, most of what gets called work is fuckery. To escape work or to escape into work or to escape sex to escape into lust, to make it work, to work at sex or to eroticize work, to be exhausted and to go on, to dally, to do all this outside credibility – the parts of working that are not working and the kinds of searching that are outside credibility, outside viability, are my topic.”
July 16, 2026
Holy whiplash, Batman. What was this? An incomprehensibly dense prose poem or historical non-fiction ? I rage-read this book, which I thought would be short enough to get through in a few hours. Ha ha on me. The dense writing and arcane vocabulary choices had me stopping every two sentences to look up words in my KOBO dictionary. I get that the author wants to slow the reader down, and takes more pleasure in the journey than the destination, but in my opinion, the author used language to obstruct meaning. I started skipping the most egregious passages indiscriminately and could not wait for this book to be over.
June 15, 2026
This was a beautifully written and thought-provoking read. I loved how the story blended history, memory, and the hidden lives of women into something deeply moving. The writing is rich and immersive, and while it asks for your attention, it rewards you with so many memorable insights. A unique novel that stayed with me long after I finished it.
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.
June 16, 2026
this book is definitely more literary then i usually like but i really enjoyed it in this case. the framing of historical research through the lens of someone trying to parse through somebody else’s scattered writings was very endearing. also i love when women call themselves hags sue me
July 5, 2026
Sometimes fails, never disappoints
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 - 20 of 20 reviews