The Place of Tides

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

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

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, 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.

© James Rebanks 2024 (P) Penguin Audio 2024

Critics Review

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 now
George Saunders
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. I didn’t want it to end, and I can’t wait to reread it
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
Tender … exquisite, limpid beauty … a book of stillness, quiet vigilance, and the kind of patience that is measured not in hours but in lifetimes
Financial Times
What a strange, enchanting book … Rebanks writes of his season with the duck women with elegance, acuity and a rare tenderness … the story is like a fairy tale; timeless except for the occasional intrusion of an outboard engine
Times Literary Supplement
Lyrical and enchanting … Slowly but surely, Rebanks draws Anna’s story from her. There’s her childhood, mythical tales of giant women, and her deep love of the island … Whether the eider will arrive and in what numbers is a constant ­anxiety, and it’s impossible not to share in Rebanks’s wonder and obvious delight when they do. Even the eggs of the eiders, small, green, speckled and hard, are in themselves things of wonder. Rebanks is an extraordinary writer, and The Place of Tides will linger in the mind for a long time
Telegraph
In honed prose akin to that of Hemingway, Rebanks weaves a quietly captivating fable about what it means to be true to your roots and your longing to save a dying world
Sydney Morning Herald
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 seascape … Rebanks 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
Here the farmer boldly slips his moorings. Unfolding like a Nordic Decameron, this is a book for a wide readership, with spare prose ... It is a book of bitten beauty, full of keen observations, and, for all its reverence, it is one of reckoning. On the cusp of the Arctic, during a magical harvest, a single-minded farmer is forced to face his own demons
Country Life
A transfixing, tender and open-hearted account of a spring spent with two remarkable people … Rebanks captures nature’s exquisiteness [and] quietly captivates the human heart. Friendships grow slowly and organically, and, as satisfying as nature itself, the tough yet delicate work strengthens these bonds. By the end, Rebanks’s anxieties about his place in his own world have dropped off him like autumn leaves. It is a beautiful journey back to himself
Irish Times

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