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*
Exceptional... Rebanks's way with words is akin to that of that of
an expert shearer with the clippers - swift, deft, skilled - and
the resulting prose is lean, vivid, tough and handsome. I loved his
book. It is one to restore faith in writing and the business of
publishing - a story not like any other, told from the inside by
someone whose passion for his subject lights up almost every
sentence
*Literary Review*
An unforgettable survivor's book that raises important questions,
not least about education... one of the most truthful depictions of
contemporary rural life that I have read
*Independent*
More than a tribute to a rare and doughty tribe. If hills could
speak, this is surely a tale the fells would tell
*Telegraph*
An enlightening, exquisitely written account... I was beguiled by
this book, an eloquent love-letter to a cherished way of life
*Daily Mail*
May well do for sheep what Helen Macdonald did for hawks
*Guardian*
Punchy, well-read and occasionally lyrical... a glorious book,
alive with the author's voice, which is strong and individual, as
befits a man who makes a living in this ancient but precarious way.
Most striking is its honesty
*Herald Scotland*
Rebanks offers a fascinating account of his life in farming that is
in equal parts memoir, social commentary and procedural. Even for
the most committed urbanite, it's a brilliant read
*Observer*
James Rebanks's unsentimental, sharply detailed memoir about his
life as a shepherd gripped me from the first page
*Wall Street Journal*
A timely and important book, with flashes of beauty in its spare
and honest prose
*Sadie Jones, author of The Outcast*
In James Rebanks we hear a new voice from the fells. The toil and
the beauty in The Shepherd's Life are utterly compelling
*Nicholas Crane, author of Coast*
A vivid, honest, unforgettably written account not just of one
shepherd's year, but of an ancient way of life
*Lucy Dillon, author of A Hundred Pieces of Me*
The Shepherd's Life is a reader's delight. No tourist wandering the
iconic Lake District is Rebanks; coming from centuries of farmers
he is as 'hefted' to the fells as the Herdwick sheep he keeps. He
lives, breathes and works his landscape - which gives him an inside
edge as sharp as shears over most of the flock of current
countryside-writers. Rebanks has written a marvellous autobiography
- of himself, his family, and the hills themselves. For they are
indivisible
*John Lewis-Stempel, author of Meadowland*
What came through was the stolid humility, gentle stubbornness and
genuine care you need to live this life. Many books are written
about a thing but this book is of a thing and is valuable for
it
*Cynan Jones, author of The Dig*
The Shepherd's Life is that rare thing, a well-written book about
the life of the land by a man who gets his living from the land.
It's a paean for a peopled landscape, and a powerful counterblast
to the doleful environmentalism that would empty our land of its
people
*Philip Walling, author of Counting Sheep*
Beautifully written
*Alan Cumming, actor and author of Not My Father's Son*
Irreverent, honest, achingly beautiful and totally authentic.
Rebanks challenges us to understand what would be lost if no one
remembers the seasons of a shepherd's life or the culture of sheep
farming. His joy is as contagious as his writing
*Linda Lear, author of Beatrix Potter: The extraordinary life of a
Victorian genius*
Truly extraordinary... written with a mastery of vivid, concrete
detail that makes you gasp
*WI Life*
A wonderful book which will surely become a Lake District classic.
Powerfully written and unflinchingly honest, it provides a vivid
insight into the realities of hill farming life
*Angus J L Winchester, Professor of Local & Landscape History,
Lancaster University*
A gorgeous book, unsentimental but exultant, vivid and profound,
and a fierce defense of small-scale farming
*National Geographic*
A beautifully told tale suffused by a profound sense of belonging
and a clear-eyed love of the land and its people.
*Sunday Morning Herald*
His prose is earthed and conversational; it feels as if you're
leaning over a gate, listening to his ruminations. The book exudes
tough passion, and a sense of belonging and love that holds you
rapt to the very last line
*Intelligent Life*
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