Riverwork

by Lisa Robertson

A glittering and erudite new novel of Paris from the author of The Baudelaire Fractal

Some ruins are invisible. Under the pavements of Paris there lies buried an ancient river, the Bièvre. For years, Lucy Frost 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 the great chroniclers of Parisian life, uncovering a history of industry: 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 ageing 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.

Genres: Fiction, France, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Canada, Poetry, 21st Century

Paperback

First published May 5, 2026

Reviews

[Dawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

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).

[Emma · Rating 5 out of 5]

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

[Tia · Rating 5 out of 5]

DEMANDING but unlike anything else? Lisa is cooking in ways we can’t even imagine…

[Hannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

fucking masterpiece ofc

[Colette Bernheim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Devoured this in a day … can’t believe I had never read Lisa Robertson before this week I am forever changed

[Hkp · Rating 4 out of 5]

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."

[Zoe]

hard 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

[Savannah Willson · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Amber · Rating 1 out of 5]

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.

[Merrin Foltz · Rating 4 out of 5]

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

[Mic Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most delightful wander through almost lost histories. Lisa’s prose is a river I don’t want to stop swimming inside of!