The book is about people living along Dyarubbin, otherwise known as the Nepean-Hawkesbury River, on the outskirts of the Greater Sydney region.

[1] It begins with chapters on the first people before the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788 and continues through early contact with "emancipist farmers" and their clearing of the land for farming.

"[4] Susan Waggoner critiqued the book for Foreword Reviews, saying "People of the River is a meticulous history whose exciting writing reveals the history of the Hawkesbury-Nepean River, the Aboriginal people who settled there, and the English and Irish convicts who arrived and built its farmlands.

"[5] Miranda Johnson, an historian at the University of Otago, concluded her review in The Sydney Morning Herald:[6] The story is richly layered because of the impressive range of disciplinary knowledge that Karskens draws on – from geology, environmental science, archaeology, history, anthropology, linguistics – and because Karskens herself has spent so much time with the river and its people.

Beautifully written, it is a work of rigorous scholarship that seamlessly integrates different historical perspectives and was a pleasure to read.