Nonfiction

The Salt Stones

Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life
By
Helen Whybrow
Preorder now for June!

“Sheep have helped me become a good shepherd, not just to them, but to a place that is my sustenance and joy as well as my unending labor and worry.”
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In the heart of Vermont’s Green Mountains, Helen Whybrow and her partner are presented with the opportunity to steward a two-hundred-acre conserved farm. Whybrow knows that “belonging more than anything requires participation” and radically intertwines her life with the land. Six months after purchasing Knoll Farm, they unload a flock of Icelandic sheep onto the field and Whybrow becomes a shepherd entering into “nature’s constant cycle of life into death into life” and all its unexpected lessons.

The challenging and profoundly rewarding work unfolds for Whybrow in the everyday rituals of farmsteading and caring for her family—birthing lambs in the late winter, harvesting blueberries in summer, fending off coyotes and foxes, seasonal shearing—while instilling the lessons of the land in her daughter and caring for her mother. As life at Knoll Farm endures years both abundant and lean, she learns that true stewardship is about accepting change and adapting. She embraces a transcendent rhythm of blood and bone, milk and muck.

At once inspiring and brave, deeply felt and gorgeously written, The Salt Stones is a loving look at the world through a shepherd’s interconnected ethos.

ISBN
9781571311627
Publish Date
Pages
304
Dimensions
8.5 × 5.5 × 1 in
Weight
18 oz
Cover Art
Author

Helen Whybrow

Helen Whybrow is the author of A Man Apart: Bill Coperthwaite’s Radical Experiment in Living and Dead Reckoning: Great Adventure Writing from 1800–1900.

Praise and Prizes

  • “In achingly poetic prose, this forthcoming chronicle of life on a Vermont hill farm captures the familial responsibilities of the shepherd — for animals, parents, children, wild things, and the land upon which we walk for such a brief time.”

    Rowan Jacobsen, The Week

  • “This is a wise and beautiful book. Helen Whybrow calls it ‘my love song to this hillside,’ speaking of the Vermont farm where, for a quarter century, she has distilled wisdom from the land and its creatures—her family, the birds and trees, the flowers and frogs, a stream of visitors, and flocks of sheep—all of them teaching or seeking ways to live intimately in place. A truly moving book, in prose and spirit, filled with deep insights, rich stories, and memorable scenes, a book to be savored and widely shared.”

    Scott Russell Sanders
    author of A Private History of Awe

  • “This profound book returns our gaze to forgotten connections with our animal kin, the Earth, and ourselves. Each paragraph shimmers with heart. With Wendell Berry’s sensibilities and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s poetic insights, Whybrow leads her readers through fertile fields of discovery and knowing. Her sentences, like carefully placed stones, mark the path toward a calm awareness of what true relationships feel like.”

    Hank Lentfer
    author of Raven’s Witness

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