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The Place of Tides
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About 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.
Reviews
"However, the real animating force of this book is Anna Måsøy, who emerges as a stubborn, spiky figure with an almost religious zeal for her unusual labor ..."
"Serene, reflective ..."
"How much sunnier its outlook would be if only we nurtured, respected and cared for it as deeply and passionately as the heroine of this book does."
"In simple storytelling cadences, Rebanks braids Anna's story with vivid evocations of waves cresting like "white horses above the green-blue ocean" and lashing rains that trap him, restless and homesick, for days on end in their small cabin, which sleeps three but has no running water ..."
"A book of stillness, quiet, vigilance, and the kind of patience that is measured not in hours but in lifetimes ..."
"This is presented as a grand realization—though it is hard for this reader to receive the epiphany with grace."
"As in his previous books, his prose is simple and clear, his depictions of nature gorgeous ..."
"Rebanks undercuts Måsøy's narrative with a half-hearted through-line about how he embarked on this trip in an attempt to regain some 'hope and self-belief' after a realisation that he 'was a poor husband, father, brother, and son'."
"It is also a deft travelogue to one of the world's wildest seascapes ..."
"Are we in for a magnificent obsession and a baggy monster of a book that shouldn't really work but somehow does?"
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