Twenty years ago, Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love inspired millions of readers to embark upon their own journeys of self-discovery. A decade later, Big Magic empowered countless others to live their most creative lives. Now comes another landmark book—about love and loss, addiction and recovery, grief and liberation.

In 2000, a friend sent Liz to see a new hairdresser named Rayya Elias. An intense and unlikely curiosity sparked between these two apparent opposites: Rayya, an East Village badass who lived boldly on her own terms but feared she was a failed artist; Liz, a married people-pleaser with a surprisingly unfettered sense of creativity. Over the years, they became friends, then best friends, then inseparable. When tragedy entered their lives, the truth was finally laid bare: The two were in love. Unacknowledged: they were also a pair of addicts, on a collision course toward catastrophe.

What if the love of your life—and the person you most trusted in the world—became a danger to your sanity and wellbeing? What if the dear friend who taught you so much about your self-destructive tendencies became the unstable partner with whom you disastrously reenacted every one of them? And what if your most devastating heartbreak opened a pathway to your greatest awakening?

All the Way to the River is for everyone who has ever been captive to love–or to any other passion, substance, or craving—and who yearns, at long last, for peace and freedom.

This book contains scenes depicting domestic abuse.

The best memoirs remind me of some truth that is too weird and specific to be found in fiction. They reflect the human condition in a way that no other genre could—and All the Way to the River, a sagacious, zany, extremely loving look at a beautiful and catastrophic relationship, represents the cream of the memoir crop.

Written by the inimitable Liz Gilbert, this book tells the love story of Liz and Rayya Elias, a motorcycle-riding, truth-telling, vibrantly charismatic woman who, when Liz meets her, is in active recovery from a severe heroin addiction. Liz and Rayya become friends, and then good friends, and then absolutely inseparable, bestest-of-best friends. That is, until Rayya is diagnosed with terminal liver cancer, and everything changes between them.

I stayed up late into the night reading this book. I was completely unable to get off the rollercoaster of Liz and Rayya’s epic relationship, enchanted by both the soaring highs and crushing, unbearable lows. There’s a certain magical energy within the pages of All the Way to the River that I’ve never quite experienced before. I have no doubt you will walk away from this story feeling like you learned unforgettable lessons—about what it means to love, believe, heal, and keep going when it feels like there’s nowhere left to go.