There is a calming, almost hypnotic effect in watching water flow, an effect brought to the pages of this small volume by 12 writers, mostly from the UK, along with one Australian, Ellena Savage. The essayists also have family backgrounds in places like Jamaica and Ghana. They write about rivers with familiar locations.

The collection starts with Jo Hamya writing about Virginia Woolf, her diaries, and her life in properties by the River Ouse, in which she famously drowned herself.

In highly personal essays, Amy Kay writes lovingly about where her mother lives, just where the Tyne River enters the sea at South Shields in the UK. Tessa Hadley uses the Rumer Godden 1946 novel, The River, as her inspiration. Godden’s story concerns an Anglo-Indian family, living beside the wide Brahmaputra River in what was then India but is now Bangladesh. Despite drama and tragedy, the river just keeps flowing.

Serious questions are raised about public access to rivers in the UK by some of the writers, men and women who enjoy swimming, paddling, and fishing in rivers.

Global travel is traced in the story by Caleb Azumah Nelson of a man from London, by way of Ghana, who every year holidays in Spain, on one occasion opting to stay in Seville by the Guadalquivir River.

These are gentle essays, just like the usual river waters that play such a major role in man’s settlements beside them.

Reviewed by Jennifer Somerville