by Lisa Robertson
published 8 October 2026
A glittering and erudite new novel of Paris from the author of The Baudelaire Fractal.
Lucy Frost is an insomniac cleaning woman in Paris. She writes in a notebook at night, documenting a series of interwoven disappearances from her adopted city.
First, her great-aunt, who vanished in her old age, but in her youth researched the Bièvre River. The Bièvre River itself, buried in 1912, for centuries the core of Paris’s textile industries. And finally the river’s laundresses, among France’s earliest labour and ecological activists, many of them active in the Paris Commune of 1871.
When Lucy receives her great-aunt’s research papers, she picks up this abandoned project and prises the defunct river’s story from the literature that depicted its winding path. Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Hugo, and Rabelais give bearings to her voice. What arises in her nightwriting is a disquieting meditation on age, failure, and maintenance.
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 resurrects, in unforgettable prose, a forgotten Parisian river and the writers and workers it threaded together.
Lisa Robertson is a Canadian poet, novelist, and art writer living in France. She has published nine books of poetry, most recently Boat (2022), three books of essays, and a novel, The Baudelaire Fractal, which was shortlisted for the 2021 Governor General’s Award for Fiction and has been published in French, Swedish, and Turkish translations. In 2018 the Foundation for the Contemporary Arts in New York awarded her the inaugural C. D. Wright Award in Poetry.
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Lisa Robertson is one of those writers who seems to invent a new genre with each book.
Marco Gluhaich, Frieze
The work of laundering, the work of revolution, and the work of writing fold into the many layers of the Bièvre, and Robertson’s geologic style plays as much with place as it does with the scales of time and historical duration.
Nicodemus Nicoludis, Bomb
One of the refrains in Riverwork – for there are many, as is characteristic of Robertson’s iterative, accumulative style – is that age-old Marxist maxim: the formation of the five senses is a labor of the entire history of the world. It is an aphorism Lucy invokes more than once, almost as a talisman for her writing and her aesthetics. No body-mind split obtains here; indeed, the body with all its effluvia is a kind of pulsating mind.
Alex Tan, The Baffler
What that body desires is the corpus of this book: to unstitch the hems of concepts, and to find there and reveal an erotics of reading that brings one into contact with the desirous bodies of others, living and dead. Desirous of sex, knowledge, aesthetics and revolution. It’s an appealing proposition.
John Douglas Millar, e-flux