Old factories, shabby houses, but also unexpected strips of wilderness: a landscape on the border between city and countryside, populated by people who have fallen out of their orders, shaping the true life at the edge of every metropolis. In nine stages of a walk around the River Lea near London, Esther Kinsky traces the overlapping traces of personal history and urban history of this river landscape, using the wilderness of the marshland as a space for memory and reflection. The River Lea becomes a boundary marker and at the same time a guidepost: experience and perception find a barrier and a destination in it. "By the River" is a book about seeing, about understanding through contemplation. In harmony with her photographs, Esther Kinsky reexamines the possibilities and limits of making the world visible.