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The co-op bookstore for avid readers
The Place of Tides
Reader Score
85%
85% of readers
recommend this book
Critic Reviews
Great
Based on 10 reviews on
A National Bestseller
"A modern classic, one we very much need right now." -George Saunders
From the acclaimed author of The Shepherd's Life, a magical work of nonfiction in which James Rebanks reflects on a life-changing summer spent on a remote island off the coast of Norway, where his only companion was an old woman who practiced the ancient tradition of collecting eiderdown from birds that nest on this remarkable landscape each year
We are all in need of lights to follow.
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.
Book Details
- Publisher: Mariner Books
- Publish Date: Jun 24th, 2025
- Pages: 304
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 8.30in - 5.80in - 1.30in - 0.75lb
- EAN: 9780063434172
- Categories: • Memoirs• Regional• Europe - Nordic Countries
About the Author
James Rebanks is a farmer based in the Lake District, where his family have lived and worked for over six hundred years. A graduate of Oxford University, James is the author of the New York Times bestseller, The Shepherd's Life, and Pastoral Song.
Critics’ reviews
Praise for this book
"In these 285 thoughtful, beautifully written pages, James Rebanks shows, better than anything I've read recently, the precise quality of the catastrophe befalling the natural world and also what we might begin to do about it. 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." -- George Saunders
"A beautiful book about the lives we think we're going to lead versus the lives we actually live."
-- Paula Hawkins
"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 seascapes. . . . [Rebanks's] assured narrative 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." -- The Sunday Times
"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." -- John Banville
"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." -- Philip Gourevitch
"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." -- Isabella Tree
"Lyrical and enchanting. . . . Rebanks is an extraordinary writer, and The Place of Tides will linger in the mind for a long time." -- The Telegraph
"[An] enchanting book... [Rebanks] writes of his season with the duck women with elegance, acuity and a rare tenderness." -- The Times Literary Supplement
"An elegiac tale. . . . It is a book of stillness, quiet, vigilance, and the kind of patience that is measured not in hours but in lifetimes." -- FT