The Salt Stones

“Spare prose, great storytelling.”

“Whybrow is uniquely positioned to understand what humans have lost in severing their bond with nature, yet her message is more hopeful than bleak.”

“Revelatory… magical… Whybrow beautifully explores interconnectedness and disruption in nature.”

“Whybrow’s closely-observed accounts of her working life as a shepherd are filled with muck, sweat and a hard-won sense of the interconnectedness of the natural world.”

“Beautiful … Whybrow’s prose is alive. In witnessing the hard but simple work of shepherding these animals, readers will feel themselves somehow tended to.”

“Whybrow writes in compelling, finely chiseled prose about the annual seasonal rhythms at her beloved Knoll Farm… . The perfect tonic for these turbulent times.”

 “A luminous and necessary addition to the literature of food and farming.”

“Through gripping anecdotes and thought-provoking meditations, this superbly crafted memoir recounts a quarter century of raising sheep.”

“Helen Whybrow is a to-the-bone writer, and this is a to-the-bone book—beautiful, real, full of life. You’ll reread it.”

“Riveting, breathtaking, intensely powerful, The Salt Stones pulses with life. I deeply love this wise and beautiful book about land and belonging, love and loss, motherhood and daughterhood, and so much more.”

“In her poetic and provocative offerings on her life as a shepherd to a flock of sheep, Helen Whybrow evokes the spirit that Aretha Franklin brought to her transcendent recording of ‘Somewhere.’ Read Whybrow. Listen to Franklin. Rejoice!”

“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.”

“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.”