The Shepherd's Life

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 MacfarlaneA very good book – Alan BennettAffectionate, 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 DiariesBloody marvellous – Helen Macdonald, author of H is for HawkA 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 – Helen Davies * 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 – Melissa Harrison * 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 – Carol Midgley * 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 – David Craig * 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 – Michiko Kakutani * New York Times *

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 and was shortlisted for both The Wainwright Prize and the Ondaatje Prize. Also known as the Herdwick Shepherd, his Twitter account of daily life in the Lakes has a strong international following. His family have lived and farmed in the Lake District for six hundred years.

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