‘If you already like any combination of Lisa Robertson or Chantal Akerman or François-René de Chateaubriand, you’re going to enjoy reading this book. If this is the first you’ve heard of any of the above, here is your chance to dip a toe into these waters that run so often unseen.’ – Dawn MacDonald, The Seaboard Review of Books

‘Robertson’s writing engages in a shrewd, at times caustic, examination of history and culture, and produces linkages between labour and capital, gender and class, and leisure and industry.’ – Jean Marc Ah-Sen, The Globe & Mail

‘Robertson’s work is precisely about the negative space around authorship. Or, to state it otherwise, all that we might find when we renounce our attachment to that individual construct of genius.’ – Alex Tan, The Baffler

‘[A] collection of labyrinthine acrobatic lexical maneuvers delivered with the unadulterated confidence of the unhinged…This is an extremely specific strain of fun, but we are definitely having it.’ – Kerry Howley, The New York Times

‘Robertson is a ventriloquist of belatedness penetrating literary forebears and empathizing with underpaid laundresses in riverine sentences and reverie.’ – Michael Greenstein, The British Columbia Review

‘There are sentences in Riverwork that I will carry with me for the rest of my life. They are now sewn onto the lining of my feminism, my metaphysics, and my most inner vocabulary.’ – Audrey Wollen, Toronto Review

Riverwork ‘is a hymn to slowness and close reading, unknowability, imperfection, wobbly human labor, false starts, and angry love; it is a scream against the increasingly omnipresent, automatically generated offers to synopsize, or synthesize, and therefore to strangle. It opts for excess.’ – Claire Foster, Bookforum 

‘To read Robertson is to witness a ventriloquism act … Riverwork is no exception.’ – Emily Mernin, Literary Review of Canada

‘[F]ascinating…The author brings her poetic gift to this particularly nuanced look into her protagonist’s world and thoughts.’ – Library Journal

‘[A]n incantatory tale of water and dust, textiles and insomnia, the slipperiness of history, the shape-shifting of art and literature, the mysteries of dreams and memories, and the knottiness of time … Robertson’s mesmerizing portrait of a learned and reflective mind shimmers with striking perceptions, murmurs with loss, and whirls with ardor and moxie.’  – Donna Seaman, Booklist

‘Lisa Robertson is one of those writers who seems to invent a new genre with each book.’ – Marko Gluhaich, Frieze

‘[I]n her latest novel, Riverwork, Lisa Robertson shifts attention to an arcane river that flowed through Paris until the beginning of the twentieth century: the Bièvre … Her novel is concerned both with histories that have been disappeared and with writing and reading as practices that daylight strata of labor, culture, and deep time.’ – Editor’s Choice, BOMB Magazine

‘Riverwork gives the sense of having been written hundreds of years ago while also anticipating the literature of the next century. The opportunity to sell a book like this is the reason I opened a bookstore.’ – James Crossley, Leviathan Bookstore

‘Riverwork is an alluvial novel, richly layered with textures of meaning, memory, and sentences that glimmer in the light.’ – Stephen Sparks, Point Reyes Books

‘A deeply introspective and lyrical account of a woman’s search for her great aunt through her writings about the Bièvre river in Paris. She seeks to add to her lost aunt’s research of this lost river while also reading, writing, cleaning houses and wandering Paris in ways similar to many thinkers who have come before.  Robertson weaves these Parisian ghosts – Proust, Baudelaire, Chateaubriand, Flaubert, etc. – in throughout the novel, creating the feeling of a shared discourse spanning centuries.’ – Laurel Kane, White Whale Bookstore

‘Inject this into my bleeding veins. Lisa Robertson’s follow-up to the underground (is it still subterranean? — am I hopeful that is? do I dare hope that it might not be?) classic, <em style= color: rgb(17