The Place of Tides
By James Rebanks
Mariner Books | 2025 | 304 pages
As a loyal reader of James Rebanks, I dove into The Place of Tides with an eagerness to learn more from his clear-eyed observations, unique to the few farmer-writers that line my bookshelf. A surprising departure from his previous work, which has focused on his multigenerational sheep farm in the Lake District of England, The Place of Tides tells the story of a “duck woman” (simply named Anna in the book) and her work to restore the eiderdown trade in Norway.
Curiosity led Rebanks to these remote islands in the Vega archipelago, now a UNESCO World Heritage site. He writes, “I had no great love of the sea, no romance in me about islands. My heroes weren’t wandering poets enraptured with the sea. But this place was beautiful.” As the tale unfolds, we learn about Anna’s history—which includes being a twice-married mother of four—before she revived her family’s trade at around age 50. Previous generations had collected the eiderdown as a main source of income. However, economic and political factors collapsed the industry throughout the entire region, which Rebanks describes as “a broken world.”
Being a farmer who has worked diligently to maintain his family’s land and farming practices, despite pressures from development and large commercial agribusiness, Rebanks is intrigued by the parallels between his work and hers. Although not a memoir, Rebanks quickly relates to the people he meets in the islands. “These were people recognizable like mine—people who spent their lives working with their hands, out in all weathers.” He slowly reveals he has taken on this assignment in order to get some distance from his hectic work life, leaving behind his wife and four children.
As a married mother of two children, I initially felt a wave of horror wondering how his wife was managing at home alone. Rebanks had a chance encounter with Anna a decade earlier and knew he wanted to return to this area. In an interview with Waterstones, Rebanks explains, “I had a heroic male narrative in my head: I would solve our family’s problems, and lead us to the promised land. My wife said I was burning out, that I was exhausted, and that I needed to rest and slow down and look after myself.” This epiphany led him back to Norway and an extended apprenticeship of sorts with Anna, now in her 70s, and her eccentric lot of helpers.
However, Rebanks does a good job of not spinning this book into his own story while still reporting on how it aligns with his own need for renewal. As he confesses in the book, “The past four years had been swallowed up by striving.” His observations of Anna and her work, a fascinating process of building, waiting, and witnessing the natural world, remain focused and sharp. Yet Rebanks does occasionally remind the reader why this break was necessary for him.
Being a fellow sheep farmer, albeit on a much smaller scale, I found solace in his admissions. E. B. White’s famous quote quote echoed in my mind: “Every morning I awake torn between a desire to save the world and an inclination to savor it. This makes it hard to plan the day.” I have taken on the hard work of farming by choice as a first-generation farmer. Literally getting off the farm is a challenge as well as carving out the mental space to reflect on what I’m doing and why. This is especially true when the pressure to keep going and to keep up with cost in a small-margin industry can be overwhelming. Sometimes it feels like the martyrdom of modern farming might destroy us all. Our farm is idyllic in many ways, but I can’t see the agroecosystem for the weeds, let alone appreciate this oasis we have built. In this sense, I appreciate Rebanks’s honesty but also wondered if his past books could have included more of it.
I finished reading the last chapters of The Place of Tides on an island off the coast of Washington, where I could look back and almost see our farm from the other side of the Puget Sound. We had taken a rare few days off to be with family. Maybe for that reason, the perspective Rebanks gained alongside Anna in this isolated seascape resonated strongly with me. He writes, “We do not think of watching the world around us as work.” In this role, he was a helper again, a student. Rebanks does the service of telling Anna’s story (something she requested he do during their time together); his prose writing is eloquent and a vein of humility runs throughout this quiet book.
Although I was skeptical this tale could carry itself into a full-length book, I found myself captivated until the end. The story of Anna’s work deserves to be told in its entirety because it is a narrative of restoration, both emotional and ecological. Rebanks’s observations alongside Anna are nature writing at its finest. “Spring came with the ducks. Huge blue skies flooded with warm sunshine, punctuated only by the tiniest of wisps of transparent cloud that layered backwards in a herringbone pattern.” Descriptions like this, filled with wonder and awe, served as the structural bones of the book. At times it felt as if the landscape itself shared Anna’s legacy. The physical descriptions of work, the tedious building and cleaning, and the long days of waiting out weather felt accurate as well. This is a story that might inspire further action to preserve habitat and live sustainably within ecosystems without relying on too much nostalgia.
Land management can often be compounded with land exploitation, but in The Place of Tides, the throughline is one of mutual benefit—a story of how humans can partner with nature, an embedded part of the landscape. Work and wonder are not incongruent as long as the work itself, however time-consuming and tedious, is not over romanticized but valued and seen in its entirety.
Jessica Gigot is a poet, farmer, and writing coach. She lives on a little sheep farm in the Skagit Valley. Her second book of poems, Feeding Hour (Wandering Aengus Press, 2020) was a finalist for the 2021 Washington State Book Award. Her memoir, A Little Bit of Land, was published by Oregon State University Press in 2022. The audiobook version was released by Julia Whelan’s Audiobrary in 2025.
Read “Moon,” an excerpt of Jessica Gigot’s A Little Bit of Land appearing in Terrain.org.
Header photo of Omnøya, an island of Vega archipelago in Norway, by Dana Morris, courtesy Wikimedia.
