If I told you that I had a great book for you, that it was about an English shepherd (yes, the guy actually is a shepherd) who spends 10 weeks in a primitive cabin on a remote Norwegian island with two women who are attending to nesting eider ducks, do you think you’d rush out and buy it?  Doubtful.

Nevertheless, that’s what I’m recommending.  Rebanks who shepherds and farms on land in the Lake District in England that his family has worked for generations has written three books in the last 10 years about his farm, sheep, and his writing life.  He writes well and engagingly, but recently, feeling middle aged angst, he wrote to a woman he had seen 10 years earlier on this deserted Norwegian island asking if he could visit and help her with her work.

Anna, a 70 year old who grew up on an island in the Vega Archipelago off the Norwegian coast, is twice divorced, the mother of two daughters, and a dedicated ‘duck lady’.  The duck ladies work from spring to fall on these outlying islands preparing nests for eider ducks and then protecting the eggs and the chicks from skuas, otters, minks, and other predators.  The eider ducks line these nesting boxes with feathers from their breasts, and the duck ladies collect the eider down which they then use to make duvets.  The ducks are vanishing as are the duvets and the duck ladies, but Anna persists as does Rebanks as they work through bad weather, rising sea levels, and other challenges to protect the ducks.

Because Rebanks is such an excellent writer this tale which could otherwise be boring or trivial takes on a larger meaning—what to do with one’s life; how to protect the earth; how to find solitude amongst the first two challenges.

This is an inspring, interesting, and engaging book for either nature lovers or fans of Norway or eider ducks. I loved it.