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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
"The Place of Tides washes over readers gently, refreshing us with its moving portrait of a quietly purposeful way of life."
"Rebanks considers The Place of Tides—while nonfiction—to be a sort of fable, and the legends he includes add to that flavor ..."
"To his credit, he writes of his season with the duck women with elegance, acuity and a rare tenderness."
"The challenges are many, the uncertainties considerable, and yet as Anna's strength grows with each passing day, it's Rebanks, too, who discovers himself shedding ill-fitting skins."
"Our best observers of the world around us are farmers, not only Rebanks but John Lewis-Stempel—nature writers with dirt under their fingernails ..."
"It's a shame, because in spite of modern publishing's unsaid requirement for every book to take its author on a journey of 'self-improvement', The Place of Tides is not served better by it."
"From the precision of these descriptions an exquisite, limpid beauty gradually emerges."
"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 ..."
"A quietly profound book."
"Rebanks learned, above all, a new rhythm for the rest of his life."
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