The Place of Tides
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4.8 • 5 Ratings
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
WATERSTONES NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE MONTH
‘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. 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 and forgiveness.
*Shortlisted for the Edward Stanford Travel Book of the Year Award*
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this soulful account, nature writer Rebanks (The Shepherd's Life) reflects on working alongside one of the last traditional "duck women," who care for eider ducks during nesting season, on Norway's Vega Archipelago. He explains that each spring, septuagenarian Anna Måsøy kept alive the ancient practice of building seaweed nests for eider ducks on one of the archipelago's small, rocky islands, protecting the birds from predators, and harvesting the eiderdown left behind. Viewing Måsøy's work as an antidote to a "modern world I didn't like very much," he convinced her to let him assist her for a 10-week season, her last before retiring. Rebanks captures the slow rhythms of life on the island, with days spent clearing out the previous season's moldy nests from wooden huts and nights spent drinking wine in the quietude of Måsøy's house, which lacked electricity and running water. In Rebanks's well-observed portrait, Måsøy emerges as a Sisyphean figure fighting courageously if futilely to preserve old ways in a changing world. For instance, he tells how she once enlisted the help of Vega's mayor to force her manager at the nursing home where she worked to allow her to spend each spring with the ducks, and how she insisted on assisting with the grueling task of building nests even as her health declined. A wistful depiction of a vanishing way of life, this will move readers.
