📖 Featured Book of the Month ~ The Place of Tides by James Rebanks

 

Penguin
17 October 2024

My thanks to the publisher for my copy of this book

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 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, building little wooden huts that will protect the ducks come spring; to the elation of the endless summer light, when the birds leave behind their precious down for the woman to gather, like feathered gold.

Slowly, Rebanks begins to understand that this woman and her world are not at all what he had previously thought. As the weeks pass, what began as a journey of escape becomes an extraordinary lesson in self-knowledge and forgiveness.

📖 My Review..

Seven years after first meeting Anna, James Rebanks leaves behind his Cumbrian farm and returns to the remote Norwegian island where Anna, now elderly, protects the Eider Ducks who return to the island each year and from which the precious eiderdown is collected. Spending springtime on the island known as The Place of Tides will test the resilience of James, Anna and her companion, Ingrid but together they learn to form a community and coexist amicably together.

With such a fascinating wealth of stories, Anna recounts the history of the rocky islands of this isolated Norwegian archipelago which lie on the edge of the Arctic circle. Recounting tales about the harshness of survival, and complete with the same degree of stubbornness which allowed her ancestors to survive, Anna, keeps the old ways alive, maintaining harsh traditions which are as fragile as the ecology to which the islands still cling.  From the surge of the tides, to the swooping majesty of seabirds in flight, the beauty and harshness of the natural world unfolds, a world which is increasingly under threat. The arrival of the ducks to the island, to nest and rear their young, is when the work begins in earnest and keeping them safe from predators and allowing natural order to be maintained takes time, skill and effort.

Poetic, lyrical and beautifully quiet in places, this is not a book to be rushed, or squandered, but rather find the time to sit and allow the ebb and flow of the tides to set its own momentum just as Anna’s forgotten way of life allows her life story and that of the Eider ducks to be heard at their own distinct pace. I have no hesitation in making The Place of Tides my Featured Book of the Month for November. 

About the Author

James Rebanks runs a family-owned farm in the Lake District in northern England. A graduate of Oxford University, James works as an expert advisor to UNESCO on sustainable tourism.

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