Published: 22/05/2025
ISBN: 9781803511689
Granta Books
pages

River of Shadows

Rebecca Solnit

In 1872, Eadward Muybridge – a British photographer, who had landed in California during the Gold Rush – captured images of high-speed movement. These photographs would go on to lay the foundations for motion pictures, changing the west coast of America, and the world, forever. River of Shadows is both a bold and original biography of a true pioneer – his trailblazing work, and his complicated life – and a portrait of America on the threshold of modernity. Drawing lines from Muybridge’s invention to Hollywood and Silicon Valley, Rebecca Solnit explores how this remarkable breakthrough has shaped the world today.

A panoramic vision of cultural change

New York Times

Extraordinary

Sunday Times

A book of powerful originality

Daily Telegraph

The Author

REBECCA SOLNIT is the author of more than twenty books, including Orwell’s Roses, which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing, Recollections of My Non-Existence, which was longlisted for the 2021 Orwell Prize for Political Writing and shortlisted for the James Tait Black Award, The Faraway Nearby, Wanderlust, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, River of Shadows and A Paradise Built in Hell. She is also the author of Men Explain Things to Me and many essays on feminism, activism, social change, hope, and the climate crisis. She writes regularly for the Guardian, the London Review of Books and the Los Angeles Times. She lives in San Francisco.