In evocative and lucid prose, James Rebanks takes us through a shepherd's year, offering a unique account of rural life and a fundamental connection with the land that most of us have lost.
James Rebanks is a shepherd based in the Lake District. His first book, The Shepherd's Life, won The Lakeland Book of the Year 2015. He is also known as the Herdwick Shepherd, whose account of shepherding has a strong following on Twitter. His family have farmed in the same area for six hundred years.
Two pages into The Shepherd's Life, I was gripped. Twenty pages in,
I was amazed. By its end, I knew I'd read an extraordinary book, at
once political and beautiful - a major addition to the modern
British literature of landscape, that can stand alongside Ronald
Blythe's classic Akenfield as a portrait of a place and its people
as seen from within
*Robert Macfarlane*
A very good book
*Alan Bennett*
Affectionate, evocative, illuminating. A story of survival - of a
flock, a landscape and a disappearing way of life. I love this
book
*Nigel Slater, author of Toast and The Kitchen Diaries*
Bloody marvellous
*Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk*
A powerful - and quietly electrifying - meditation... Page by page,
he builds what amounts to a 21st-century pastoral manifesto. The
book is an unsentimental education, part history of farming in the
Lake District, part personal memoir. And yet it still soars...
Rebanks's prose is beautifully sure-footed
*Sunday Times*
A remarkable achievement... Utterly unsentimental, The Shepherd's
Life is, nevertheless, profoundly moving... The human values that
imbue The Shepherd's Life are, perhaps, ones that Britain,
disillusioned and scandal weary, could do with being reminded of
right now
*Financial Times*
Rebanks's enthusiasm and talent for poetic writing is infectious...
[His] words create not only a gorgeous landscape painting of the
Lake District and its inhabitants, human, animal, bird and fish,
but also a useful social document... What is most striking about
this book is its authenticity; this is the real thing
*The Times*
A wonderfully detailed and candid account of a life that is both
individual and typical of this role in rural society... told with
perfect pitch, in prose that flows as easily as speech, cleaves
hungrily to the particular, and shifts without strain between the
workaday and the imaginative
*Guardian*
Absorbing, often funny, and beautifully written... a testament to
the importance of maintaining a connection to the land
*Observer*
Captivating... A book about continuity and roots and a sense of
belonging in an age that's increasingly about mobility and
self-invention. Hugely compelling
*New York Times*
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