A visit to the rapid where she lost a cherished friend unexpectedly reignites Amy-Jane Beer's love of rivers setting her on a journey of natural, cultural and emotional discovery.

On New Year's Day 2012, Amy-Jane Beer's beloved friend Kate set out with a small group of others to kayak the river Rawthey in the Howgill Fells. Kate never came home, and her death left her devoted family and friends bereft and unmoored.

Finally visiting the Rawthey years later, Amy-Jane realises how much she misses the connection to the natural world she always felt when she was close to rivers, and so begins a new phase of exploration.

The result is a book of many rivers and many voices. The voices are those of friends, writers, poets, singers, conservationists, adventurers, river managers, campaigners, farmers, artists, historians, archaeologists.

The rivers are primarily British, including West Country torrents (the Dart and East Lyn), swollen giants (the Severn and Thames), rocky Welsh canyons, Pennine white water classics, the salmon highways of Scotland, the gin-clear chalk rivers of the Yorkshire Wolds, and the astonishing slot canyon of Hell Gill. The strange course of theYorkshire Derwent (which rises near the sea and turns inland) meanders through the book. Remarkable for its history, ecology, and legal status, the Derwent prompted thehighest court in the land to ask: what is a river?

The Flow is a book about water and, like water, it runs through myriad lives and landscapes, with tributary themes of nature and adventure, loss and recovery (of people and ecosystems), friendship, motherhood, mythology, cyclicity and transformation, history and prehistory, farming, rewilding, flood management and access to nature