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 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

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

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

Tom Fort, 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

Richard Benson, Independent

More than a tribute to a rare and doughty tribe. If hills could speak, this is surely a tale the fells would tell

Horatio Clare, Telegraph

An enlightening, exquisitely written account... I was beguiled by this book, an eloquent love-letter to a cherished way of life

Brian Viner, Daily Mail

May well do for sheep what Helen Macdonald did for hawks

Stephen Moss, 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

Alexander Larman, Observer

James Rebanks's unsentimental, sharply detailed memoir about his life as a shepherd gripped me from the first page

Moira Hodgson, 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

Maryn McKenna, 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