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The Place of Tides
by James Rebanks
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WATERSTONES NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE MONTH THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER ‘Enchanting’ Telegraph ‘Miraculous’ Isabella Tree ‘Exquisite’ FT From the No.1 bestselling author of The Shepherd's Life, an unforgettable story of friendship, redemption and a life-changing voyage of discovery on a remote Norwegian island How far do you have to go to find yourself? 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 Eider 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.…
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"I enjoyed this a lot. The author travels to a remote Norwegian archipelago to document the life of a woman called Anna, a mature lady who is upholding an ancient tradition of caring for eider ducks—making little houses for them as nesting sites—so as to gather the down they leave scattered there. It’s in order to make eiderdown quilts. In a way, it’s an anthropological examination of that way of life, but it’s also a kind of fable. It’s a tribute to the small act of resilience, the heroism of people working in their own communities and landscapes. That’s obviously something that resonates for Rebanks. A lot of people will know his earlier, quite gritty books, A Shepherd’s Life and English Pastoral . They’re about change and survival in our own rural terrain. I found this fascinating, and surprising. It was carefully observed and original, and honest in the way he interrogated his own feelings about what he was seeing. It’s not the kind of material that you could look up online and regurgitate—he really went there, witnessed, and recorded. Yes, and I liked that. It didn’t necessarily give a lot of historical background. He keeps it very much in the moment, his own personal experience in that place at that time. Which I thought was nice and fitted the idea of it being a fable."
"If you’re looking for an escape from the stresses of what English farmer and author James Rebanks calls our “dark and chaotic world,” I highly recommend his transporting account of 10 weeks on a tiny Norwegian island where he arranges to help one of the last “duck women” through the annual eiderdown harvest. Initially feeling burned out and restless, Rebanks comes to find the painstaking, repetitive work of preparing for and tending the breeding ducks both settling and calming. This lovely, meditative book is a paean to slowing down and paying attention."