To the River, By Olivia Laing

The marriage of walking and meditation

Olivia Laing's superb travelogue recounts a hike along the River Ouse in Sussex. It is a book that exemplifies Herman Melville's idea that "meditation and water are wedded"; as Laing walks, she reflects on the history and culture of the region: from medieval folktales to the novels of Virginia Woolf, who drowned in the river in 1941.

But Laing also treats us to some beautifully evocative nature writing. She always finds the right phrase, whether it is in describing "the cold green reek" that betrays the presence of a sluggish stream, or in capturing the sound of a wren's chirp ("like a 10p dropped against a bottle").

Her fluid prose, rather like the Ouse itself, has a slow but inexorable momentum.