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‘Don’t give up on us’: James Rebanks on the future of farming – and how he saved his land

An Inheritance

English Pastoral

THE SUNDAY TIMES NATURE BOOK OF THE YEAR 
 
The new bestseller from the author of The Shepherd's Life 
 
'A beautifully written story of a family, a home and a changing landscape' Nigel Slater 
 
As a boy, James Rebanks's grandfather taught him to work the land the old way. Their family farm in the Lake District hills was part of an ancient agricultural landscape: a patchwork of crops and meadows, of pastures grazed with livestock, and hedgerows teeming with wildlife. And yet, by the time James inherited the farm, it was barely recognisable. The men and women had vanished from the fields; the old stone barns had crumbled; the skies had emptied of birds and their wind-blown song. 
 
English Pastoral is the story of an inheritance: one that affects us all. It tells of how rural landscapes around the world were brought close to collapse, and the age-old rhythms of work, weather, community and wild things were lost. And yet this elegy from the northern fells is also a song of hope: of how, guided by the past, one farmer began to salvage a tiny corner of England that was now his, doing his best to restore the life that had vanished and to leave a legacy for the future. 
 
This is a book about what it means to have love and pride in a place, and how, against all the odds, it may still be possible to build a new pastoral: not a utopia, but somewhere decent for us all. 
 
'A heartfelt book and one that dares to hope' Alan Bennett 
 
'A wonder of a book, fierce, tender, and beautiful' Helen Macdonald 
 
Winner of the Wainwright Prize 
Winner of the Fortnum &amp; Mason Food Book of the Year 
Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize 
Shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize 
Longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize

Remarkable ... A brilliant, beautiful book ... Eloquent, persuasive and electric with the urgency that comes out of love

It is a book full of love: of his grandfather, of his children and of the Lake District valley where he lives and farms ... Some books change our world. I hope this turns out to be one of them.

A beautifully written story of a family, a home and a changing landscape.

James Rebanks's English Pastoral deserves to be called a masterpiece. Four generations of his family building on centuries of their farming in the Cumbrian Fells gives us a poetic, practical, raw and almost miraculously detailed picture of this ancient way of life struggling to survive and to be reborn. This wonderful book was waiting to be written.

A wonder of a book, fierce, tender, and beautiful. Deeply personal but also global in significance, its pages course with love and concern so palpable I more than once wept while reading it. James Rebanks writes lyrically and passionately of the shadow that has fallen over our relationship with land, and how we might reconfigure the ways we think about it, relate to it, interact with it, and with each other. It's both a sobering, urgent read and a deeply inspiring, hopeful one. The book, and author, are to be treasured

Powerful, important and deserves every accolade.

One of the most important books of our time. Told with humility and grace, this story of farming over three generations - where we went wrong and how we can change our ways - will be our land's salvation.

What a terrific book: vivid and impassioned and urgent--and, in both its alarm and its awe for the natural world, deeply convincing. Rebanks leaves no doubt that the question of how to farm is a question of human survival on this hard-used planet. He should be read by everyone who grows food, and by everyone who eats it

James Rebanks's story of his family's farm is just about perfect. It belongs with the finest writing of its kind

Ambitious, accomplished ... Rebanks is eloquent - scenes of mud and guts are interspersed with quotes ranging from Virgil to Schumpeter, Rachel Carson to Wendell Berry ... English Pastoral builds into a heartfelt elegy for all that has been lost from our landscape, and a rousing disquisition on what could be regained - a rallying cry for a better future.

Heartfelt, rich with detail ... James Rebanks writes with his heart, and his heart is in the right place. We should listen to him.

Richard Flanagan, Man Booker Prize winning author of Narrow Road to the Deep North

It moved me to tears, made me feel excited and optimistic, and said, so eloquently and succinctly, all the things I've been thinking and feeling ... It is not just a beautiful book to read, but so important and so timely. A wonderful, thought-provoking, heartlifting read.

Rapturous ... For Rebanks writing and farming have proved complementary: while working long hours on the land he has produced a book in a pastoral tradition that runs from Virgil to Wendell Berry

I have never met anyone so roaringly, joyously in context and content as James Rebanks, belting around his farm in the rain ... The story of Rebanks and his family is the story of what farming has been in Britain but, also, the story of what it could become

Perfectly judged, it made me cry (twice) and left me with a new understanding of agriculture, and a real sense of hope.

Wonderful ... I can't imagine anyone starting to read English Pastoral and not being eager to read it all at once, as I did

A heartfelt book and one that dares to hope.

A home-grown Georgics for the twenty-first century

A wonderful and timely account of one farmer's lifelong effort to do right by his family, his land, his animals and his ecosystem

Lyrical, evocative, generous ... Thank the gods of agriculture for James Rebanks

A book of toil and beauty, rooted in a fell farm in the Lake District ... English Pastoral is a nuanced, hopeful, honest story. It is essential reading.

The power of English Pastoral lies not just in the passion and eloquence of its prose or the clarity of its argument. It carries the authority of one who has not just thought about these problems, but lived them. It is a timely and important book.

Beautiful and shocking, but ultimately so gloriously hopeful. The book we should all read as we emerge from this latest strangeness.

I can't remember a book I've wanted to press into people's hands more this year than this resonant, immensely thoughtful look back at three generations of a farming family ... Managing to cram the whole modern history of British farming and nature into 270 beautifully written pages, this is a gem that's moving and immensely informative.

A rare and urgent book ... Its beauty is not only in the writing but in what is behind it: a gentle and wise sensibility that is alive to the human love affair with the land and yet also intimately cognisant of our collective and systematic cruelty towards it.

I think, genuinely, this is the best book I've read this year, and one of the most important books of recent years. It is about food and farming, and how we eat what we eat. It's about progress and nostalgia, without being prideful or mawkish, it's about families and tradition, and the passing of time. It made me simultaneously proud to be British, and sad for what we have become, but hopeful that we can change.

James Rebanks combines the descriptive powers of a great novelist with the pragmatic wisdom of a farmer who has watched his world transformed. This is a profound and beautiful book about the land, and how we should live off it.

Through the eyes of James Rebanks as a grandson, son, and then father, we witness the tragic decline of traditional agriculture, and glimpse what we must now do to make it right again. As an evocation of British landscape past and present, it's up there with Cider With Rosie.

English Pastoral is a work of art. It is nourishing and grounding to read ... this brave and beautiful book will shape hearts and minds.

Jane Clarke, author of When the Tree Falls

A wonderful, humane book told through the eyes of a man who has watched much vanish from his land, and now wants to put it back ... Moving and illuminating.

James Rebanks describes the life of a Lakeland working farmer from the inside with a unrivalled truth and eloquence

Vivid, accessible, inspiring - a story about one man's emerging land ethic, and an appreciation of the old ways in modern times. A vital book for anybody who eats

James Rebanks is a beautiful writer, in a unique position to describe the challenges currently being faced by farmers throughout the world. English Pastoral is a joy to read and extremely moving - a book which should be read by every citizen.

Farming, unlike almost any other job, is bound up in a series of complex ropes that Rebanks captures in his own story so beautifully: family pressure and loyalty, ego, loneliness, and a special kind of peer pressure...English Pastoral is going to be the most important book published about our countryside in decades, if not a generation

A deeply personal account by a farmer of what has happened to farming in Britain. Everyone interested in food should read this compelling, informative, moving book

Rebanks is a rare find indeed: a Lake District farmer whose family have worked the land for 600 years, with a passion to save the countryside and an elegant prose style to engage even the most urban reader. He's refreshingly realistic about how farmed and wild landscapes can coexist and technology can be tamed. A story for us all.

Evening Standard, Best Books of Autumn 2020

Moving, thought-provoking and beautifully written.

English Pastoral is one of the most captivating memoirs of recent years ...The traditional pastoral is about retreat into an imagined rural idyll, but this confronts very real environmental dilemmas. Like the best books, it gives you hope and new energy.

James Rebanks has a sharp eye and a lyrical heart. His book is devastating, charting the murderous and unsustainable revolution in modern farming ... But it is also uplifting: Rebanks is determined to hang on to his Herdwicks, to keep producing food, and to bring back the curlews and butterflies and the soil fertility to his beloved fields. Truly a significant book for our time.

Lyrical and illuminating ... will fascinate city-dwellers and country-lovers alike.

Independent – 10 Best Non-Fiction Books of 2020

A lyrical account of Rebanks' childhood on the Lake District farm that he's made famous; an account of how he learned about stockmanship and community and the rhythms of the land from his father and grandfather. [...] His writing is properly Romantic, which is a high compliment [...] Rebanks is obviously a wonderful human as well as a splendid writer.

A lament for lost traditions, a celebration of a way of living and a reminder that nature is 'finite and breakable.' Mr. Rebanks hits all the right notes and deserves to be heard

The most important story, perfectly told

Memorable, urgent, eloquent ... Rebanks speaks with blunt, unmatched authority. He is also a fine writer with descriptive power and a gift for characterisation ... English Pastoral may be the most passionate ecological corrective since Rachel Carson's Silent Spring

James Rebanks is a farmer based in the Lake District, where his family have lived and worked for over six hundred years. His No.1 bestselling debut, The Shepherd's Life, won the Lake District Book of the Year, was shortlisted for the Wainwright and Ondaatje prizes, and has been translated into sixteen languages. His second book, English Pastoral, was also a Top Ten bestseller and was named the Sunday Times Nature Book of the Year. Heralded as a 'masterpiece' by the New Statesman, it won the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing and was named Fortnum and Mason Food Book of the Year; it was also shortlisted for the Orwell and Ondaatje prizes, and longlisted for the Rathbones Folio award.

As a boy, James Rebanks's grandfather taught him to work the land the old way. Their family farm in the Lake District hills was part of an ancient landscape: a patchwork of crops and meadows, of pastures grazed with livestock, and hedgerows teeming with wildlife. And yet, by the time James inherited the farm, it was barely recognisable. The men and women had vanished from the fields; the old stone barns had crumbled; the skies had emptied of birds and their wind-blown song. 
 
English Pastoral is the story of an inheritance: one that affects us all. It tells of how rural landscapes around the world were brought close to collapse, and the age-old rhythms of work, weather, community and wild things were lost. And yet this elegy from the Lake District fells is also a song of hope: how, guided by the past, one farmer began to salvage a tiny corner of England that was now his, doing his best to restore the life that had vanished and to leave a legacy for the future. 
 
This is a book about what it means to have love and pride in a place, and how, against all the odds, it may still be possible to build a new pastoral: not a utopia, but somewhere decent for us all.

The Illustrated Herdwick Shepherd

I am the luckiest man alive, because I get to live and work in the most beautiful place on earth: Matterdale in the English Lake District. 
 
When I was a child we didn't really go anywhere, except a week in the Isle of Man when I was about ten years old, and I never left Britain until I was twenty. 
 
Even now, years later, the best bit of any travelling is coming home. 
 
Bringing us into the world of shepherd's baking competitions, sheep shows and moments out on the fell watching the sheep run away home, James Rebanks interweaves thoughts and reflections on the art of shepherding with his photographs of the valley, people and animals that make up the daily life of the fells. A life lived by the three hundred surviving fell farming families, this is a book of photos and words filled with reverence and love.

Combines excellent photography with more life-writings

[Praise for The Shepherd's Life]: Affectionate, evocative, illuminating. A story of survival - of a flock, a landscape and a disappearing way of life. I love this book

Nigel Slater, author of Toast and The Kitchen Diaries

A powerful - and quietly electrifying - meditation... Page by page, he builds what amounts to a 21st-century pastoral manifesto. The book is an unsentimental education, part history of farming in the Lake District, part personal memoir. And yet it still soars... Rebanks's prose is beautifully sure-footed

Rebanks's enthusiasm and talent for poetic writing is infectious... [His] words create not only a gorgeous landscape painting of the Lake District and its inhabitants, human, animal, bird and fish, but also a useful social document... What is most striking about this book is its authenticity; this is the real thing

A wonderfully detailed and candid account of a life that is both individual and typical of this role in rural society... told with perfect pitch, in prose that flows as easily as speech, cleaves hungrily to the particular, and shifts without strain between the workaday and the imaginative

An enlightening, exquisitely written account... I was beguiled by this book, an eloquent love-letter to a cherished way of life

James Rebanks is a shepherd based in the Lake District. His first book, The Shepherd's Life, won The Lakeland Book of the Year 2015 and was shortlisted for both The Wainwright Prize and the Ondaatje Prize. Also known as the Herdwick Shepherd, his Twitter account of daily life in the Lakes has a strong international following. His family have lived and farmed in the Lake District for six hundred years.

A Tale of the Lake District

The Shepherd's Life

THE SUNDAY TIMES NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER 
 
'Affectionate, evocative, illuminating. A story of survival - of a flock, a landscape and a disappearing way of life. I love this book' Nigel Slater 
 
'Triumphant, a pastoral for the 21st century' Helen Davies, Sunday Times, Books of the Year 
 
'The nature publishing sensation of the year, unsentimental yet luminous' Melissa Harrison, The Times, Books of the Year 
 
Some people's lives are entirely their own creations. James Rebanks' isn't. The first son of a shepherd, who was the first son of a shepherd himself, he and his family have lived and worked in and around the Lake District for generations. Their way of life is ordered by the seasons and the work they demand, and has been for hundreds of years. A Viking would understand the work they do: sending the sheep to the fells in the summer and making the hay; the autumn fairs where the flocks are replenished; the gruelling toil of winter when the sheep must be kept alive, and the light-headedness that comes with spring, as the lambs are born and the sheep get ready to return to the fells.

Two pages into The Shepherd's Life, I was gripped. Twenty pages in, I was amazed. By its end, I knew I'd read an extraordinary book, at once political and beautiful - a major addition to the modern British literature of landscape, that can stand alongside Ronald Blythe's classic Akenfield as a portrait of a place and its people as seen from within

Affectionate, evocative, illuminating. A story of survival - of a flock, a landscape and a disappearing way of life. I love this book

A remarkable achievement... Utterly unsentimental, The Shepherd's Life is, nevertheless, profoundly moving... The human values that imbue The Shepherd's Life are, perhaps, ones that Britain, disillusioned and scandal weary, could do with being reminded of right now

Absorbing, often funny, and beautifully written... a testament to the importance of maintaining a connection to the land

Captivating... A book about continuity and roots and a sense of belonging in an age that's increasingly about mobility and self-invention. Hugely compelling

Exceptional... Rebanks's way with words is akin to  that of that of an expert shearer with the clippers - swift, deft, skilled - and the resulting prose is lean, vivid, tough and handsome. I loved his book. It is one to restore faith in writing and the business of publishing - a story not like any other, told from the inside by someone whose passion for his subject lights up almost every sentence

An unforgettable survivor's book that raises important questions, not least about education... one of the most truthful depictions of contemporary rural life that I have read

More than a tribute to a rare and doughty tribe. If hills could speak, this is surely a tale the fells would tell

May well do for sheep what Helen Macdonald did for hawks

Punchy, well-read and occasionally lyrical...  a glorious book, alive with the author's voice, which is strong and individual, as befits a man who makes a living in this ancient but precarious way. Most striking is its honesty

Rebanks offers a fascinating account of his life in farming that is in equal parts memoir, social commentary and procedural. Even for the most committed urbanite, it's a brilliant read

James Rebanks's unsentimental, sharply detailed memoir about his life as a shepherd gripped me from the first page

A timely and important book, with flashes of beauty in its spare and honest prose

In James Rebanks we hear a new voice from the fells. The toil and the beauty in The Shepherd's Life are utterly compelling

A vivid, honest, unforgettably written account not just of one shepherd's year, but of an ancient way of life

Lucy Dillon, author of A Hundred Pieces of Me

The Shepherd's Life is a reader's delight. No tourist wandering the iconic Lake District is Rebanks; coming from centuries of farmers he is as 'hefted' to the fells as the Herdwick sheep he keeps. He lives, breathes and works his landscape - which gives him an inside edge as sharp as shears over most of the flock of current countryside-writers. Rebanks has written a marvellous autobiography - of himself, his family, and the hills themselves. For they are indivisible

What came through was the stolid humility, gentle stubbornness and genuine care you need to live this life. Many books are written about a thing but this book is of a thing and is valuable for it

The Shepherd's Life is that rare thing, a well-written book about the life of the land by a man who gets his living from the land. It's a paean for a peopled landscape, and a powerful counterblast to the doleful environmentalism that would empty our land of its people

Alan Cumming, actor and author of Not My Father's Son

Irreverent, honest, achingly beautiful and totally authentic. Rebanks challenges us to understand what would be lost if no one remembers the seasons of a shepherd's life or the culture of sheep farming. His joy is as contagious as his writing

Linda Lear, author of Beatrix Potter: The extraordinary life of a Victorian genius

Truly extraordinary... written with a mastery of vivid, concrete detail that makes you gasp

A wonderful book which will surely become a Lake District classic. Powerfully written and unflinchingly honest, it provides a vivid insight into the realities of hill farming life

Angus J L Winchester, Professor of Local & Landscape History, Lancaster University

A gorgeous book, unsentimental but exultant, vivid and profound, and a fierce defense of small-scale farming

A beautifully told tale suffused by a profound sense of belonging and a clear-eyed love of the land and its people.

His prose is earthed and conversational; it feels as if you're leaning over a gate, listening to his ruminations. The book exudes tough passion, and a sense of belonging and love that holds you rapt to the very last line

Some people's lives are entirely their own creations. James Rebanks' isn't. The first son of a shepherd, who was the first son of a shepherd himself, he and his family have lived and worked in and around the Lake District for generations. 
 
In evocative and lucid prose, James Rebanks takes us through a shepherd's year, offering a unique account of rural life and a fundamental connection with the land that most of us have lost.

James Rebanks

Humane, beautifully paced, gentle, and strangely compelling, The Place of Tides feels like, not only a modern classic, but one we very much need right now

A magnificent book -- wonderfully unlike any other. The Place of Tides is big-hearted and transporting, a quietly gripping reckoning with self-sufficiency and interdependence, with the lives that make us and the lives that we make. I didn’t want it to end, and I can’t wait to reread it

James Rebanks has done a miraculous thing. He takes the reader with him to a stark, remote island on the strangest mission in the toughest circumstances and makes you feel like you’re coming home. A profound, transformative, uplifting story

Tender … exquisite, limpid beauty … a book of stillness, quiet vigilance, and the kind of patience that is measured not in hours but in lifetimes

What a strange, enchanting book … Rebanks writes of his season with the duck women with elegance, acuity and a rare tenderness … the story is like a fairy tale; timeless except for the occasional intrusion of an outboard engine

Lyrical and enchanting … Slowly but surely, Rebanks draws Anna’s story from her. There’s her childhood, mythical tales of giant women, and her deep love of the island … Whether the eider will arrive and in what numbers is a constant ­anxiety, and it’s impossible not to share in Rebanks’s wonder and obvious delight when they do. Even the eggs of the eiders, small, green, speckled and hard, are in themselves things of wonder. Rebanks is an extraordinary writer, and The Place of Tides will linger in the mind for a long time

In honed prose akin to that of Hemingway, Rebanks weaves a quietly captivating fable about what it means to be true to your roots and your longing to save a dying world

A quietly profound book. It is a story about a still-essential way of living in the modern world and finding a way to keep going. It is also a deft travelogue to one of the world’s wildest seascape … Rebanks paints a picture of a wondrous world. It is one that few of us will ever visit but are all the better for knowing about

Here the farmer boldly slips his moorings. Unfolding like a Nordic Decameron, this is a book for a wide readership, with spare prose ... It is a book of bitten beauty, full of keen observations, and, for all its reverence, it is one of reckoning. On the cusp of the Arctic, during a magical harvest, a single-minded farmer is forced to face his own demons

A transfixing, tender and open-hearted account of a spring spent with two remarkable people … Rebanks captures nature’s exquisiteness [and] quietly captivates the human heart. Friendships grow slowly and organically, and, as satisfying as nature itself, the tough yet delicate work strengthens these bonds. By the end, Rebanks’s anxieties about his place in his own world have dropped off him like autumn leaves. It is a beautiful journey back to himself

The Place of Tides is a magical book, at once a lament for a world in danger of disappearing, and a celebration of an indomitable spirit determined to preserve it. James Rebanks has written a quiet yet ringing masterpiece.

The Place of Tides is terrific – so honest and strange. It’s somehow about eider ducks, middle age, one woman’s breathtaking skill and determination, the collapse of the natural order and everything in between. I think it’s Rebanks’ best book yet

Deeply felt and moving … the friendship in the book is hard won, and all the more beautiful for that. It is the most inspiring book I‘ve read for years

The Place of Tides is a captivating portrait of a younger man learning from an older woman, of the great buzzing jungle of the modern world versus the silent wisdom of old ways, of paying attention to your heart instead of the internet, of finding out how to go your own way. It is a revelation about another way of living, long past, but now revived. But what really strikes is the emotional profundity. Rebanks lays himself open, as a man in need of redemption, who finds solace in the remotest of places, and with the most unexpected of people: a Scandinavian duck woman in her seventies. The book will stand as one of the great portraits of a wise, courageous and indomitable woman written in tribute by a grateful man

Deceptively simple, emotionally surprising, beautiful, and true

A fable-like tale, as beautiful and elusive as the idea of home and self it seeks to recover

A very beautiful book. Rebanks has written with a chiselled restraint, a Norse toughness, sharp humour, painful wisdom and alertness not quite of our age

A profound reflection on the natural world

An extraordinary story, gently told. This was just the book I needed

This is utterly engaging storytelling. The drama, the change, the mystery, the unknown; the details of nature, the moods, the hope and despair; the memories, reflections and learning that emerge out of long lives lived fully: The Place of Tides tells a beautiful story that is profound and moving

The Place of Tides is all that I want from a story: poetic, true and full of feeling

A love letter to the quiet and complex majesty of a little-known landscape and the women that tirelessly tend to it. It moved, humbled and educated me and made a place I have never set my eyes on suddenly vivid and close

A charismatic portrait of fidelity and the true meaning of home

A tender account … the greatest joy of this book lies in the descriptions of the northern seascape – the colours, the Arctic light, the wild things … wilderness and unknowable places return us to the curiosity of childhood. Our humanity is restored

Surprisingly gripping … Rebanks excels at describing the raw beauty of the island

A spellbinding story of wildness, healing and nature. A message we all need to hear, told with immense honesty and vulnerability. Magical!

James Rebanks is one of my favorite writers, a disciplined original on the past and future of people in nature and how to live, how to proceed.

I've loved everything about the writing, the characters, the kindness, the landscape, the gentle revelations. It's beautiful - a really beautiful and necessary book for these difficult, broken times

A beautiful and disarmingly profound book that, through the prism of nature, a remote Norwegian island and an extraordinary woman, explores the themes of friendship, forgiveness, redemption and how we live with the past in the present. Rebanks writes at his best: sharp, sparing, acutely observant and open-hearted, weaving the story of his own life, motivations and memories with that of a woman working her last season on the fringes where human and nature collide and collude. It’s all in here, gently gathered like eider feathers in a nest: the seasons, the world, us, who we are and how we get there, the echo-glimpses of the past and the future

Detailed and gritty, and extremely moving: a portrait of a place, person and time approaching an immense change

Hopeful… It had me completely transported … The book felt like a window into a place of enchantment, and that is such a precious thing in a world that is very disenchanted

Heartfelt, tender, contemplative... The Place of Tides washes over readers gently, refreshing us with its moving portrait of a quietly purposeful way of life

Enchanting ... this book offers readers an oasis of calm in our turbulent world

A lovely book, almost dreamlike in its lulling rhythms …[the] animating force of this book is Anna Måsøy, who emerges as a stubborn, spiky figure with an almost religious zeal for her unusual labour … The book is really a celebration of Anna – the circumstances that led her, in late middle age, to abandon a normal job o the mainland to devote herself to eider ducks

Remarkable … Rebanks learns much about himself; to stop striving for machine-line perfection and just do his best. With this book, he has

One afternoon many years ago, James Rebanks met an old woman on a remote Norwegian island. She lived and worked alone on a tiny rocky outcrop, caring for wild ducks and gathering their down. Hers was a centuries-old trade that had once made men and women rich, but had long been in decline. Still, somehow, she seemed to be hanging on. 
 
Back at home, Rebanks couldn’t stop thinking about the woman on the rocks. She was fierce and otherworldly – and yet strangely familiar. Years passed. Then, one day, he wrote her a letter, asking if he could return. Bring work clothes, she replied, and good boots, and come quickly: her health was failing. And so he travelled to the edge of the Arctic to witness her last season on the island. 
 
This is the story of that season. It is the story of a unique and ancient landscape, and of the woman who brought it back to life. It traces the pattern of her work from the rough, isolated toil of bitter winter, to the elation of the endless summer light, when the birds leave behind their precious down for gathering, like feathered gold. 
 
Slowly, Rebanks begins to understand that this woman and her world are not what he had previously thought. What began as a journey of escape becomes an extraordinary lesson in self-knowledge, forgiveness and how to make lasting change.

James Rebanks

Praise for The Place of Tides

**Humane, beautifully paced, gentle, and strangely compelling, The Place of Tides feels like, not only a modern classic, but one we very much need right now**

A magnificent book -- wonderfully unlike any other. The Place of Tides is big-hearted and transporting, a quietly gripping reckoning with self-sufficiency and interdependence, with the lives that make us a ...

James Rebanks has done a miraculous thing. He takes the reader with him to a stark, remote island on the strangest mission in the toughest circumstances and makes you feel like you’re coming home. A profound, tra ...

**Humane, beautifully paced, gentle, and strangely compelling, The Place of Tides feels like, not only a modern classic, but one we very much need right now**

A magnificent book -- wonderfully unlike any other. The Place of Tides is big-hearted and transporting, a quietly gripping reckoning with self-sufficiency and interdependence, with the lives that make us a ...

James Rebanks has done a miraculous thing. He takes the reader with him to a stark, remote island on the strangest mission in the toughest circumstances and makes you feel like you’re coming home. A profound, tra ...

**Humane, beautifully paced, gentle, and strangely compelling, The Place of Tides feels like, not only a modern classic, but one we very much need right now**

A magnificent book -- wonderfully unlike any other. The Place of Tides is big-hearted and transporting, a quietly gripping reckoning with self-sufficiency and interdependence, with the lives that make us a ...

James Rebanks has done a miraculous thing. He takes the reader with him to a stark, remote island on the strangest mission in the toughest circumstances and makes you feel like you’re coming home. A profound, tra ...

Books by James Rebanks

Articles featuring James Rebanks

‘Don’t give up on us’: James Rebanks on the future of farming – and how he saved his land

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