Rights sold

• MacLehose Press (World English)
• Iperborea (Italy)
• Knesebeck Verlag (Germany)

Read our sample translation of The Boundless River

About the book

In The Boundless River Mathijs Deen brings the reader, as he did in his acclaimed books The Wadden Islands and Down Old Roads, into his unique world: the grey zone between fact and fiction, knowledge and imagination. ‘Imagine the river is a character, then she’ll have a birth and death as well. Tell me how she was born.’ That is the question Deen asks a geologist one sunny day in September. The answer that follows is the start of a journey that will carry the reader from a time far before we ever spoke of a European continent to the current day, in which skippers still see the Rhine as a living being, a person.  Meandering from the mighty hippos that once grazed on the river’s banks millions of years ago to the exhausted salmon that saw their habitat slowly change, from the girl from ancient Steinheim to the Roman general Corbulo, to the young Goethe and the North Sea fisherman Kommer Tanis – Deen shows how, since the beginning of time, the river has connected and divided, terrified, consoled, sustained and engulfed.