Sign-In
Cart
Riverwork
Paperback
General FictionLiterary Fiction
Publisher Price: $18.95
ISBN13: 9781552455173
Publisher: Coach House Books
Published: May 5 2026
Pages: 240
Weight: 0.75
Height: 0.90 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
A lost river, a lost aunt, a found literary life: 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, 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 Rousseau, Rabelais, Hugo, Chateaubriand, and the like. She uncovers 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.
Also from
Robertson, Lisa
Also in
Literary Fiction
Elizabeth Spencer: Novels & Stories (Loa #344): The Voice at the Back Door / The Light in the Piazza / Knights and Dragons / Stories
Spencer, Elizabeth
Hardcover
James Fenimore Cooper: The Leatherstocking Tales Vol. 1 (Loa #26): The Pioneers / The Last of the Mohicans / The Prairie
Cooper, James Fenimore
Hardcover
The Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy, Volume I: American Tabloid, the Cold Six Thousand; Introduction by Thomas Mallon
Ellroy, James
Hardcover
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Paperback
Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose, and Diary Excerpts
Plath, Sylvia
Paperback
Philip Roth: Novels 1967-1972 (Loa #158): When She Was Good / Portnoy's Complaint / Our Gang / The Breast
Roth, Philip
Hardcover
The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk
St Aubyn, Edward
Paperback