The Place of Tides

"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."