“Continuity and loss form the twin themes of this memoir, long-listed for the National Book Award, which recounts the author’s experience running a small family sheep farm in Vermont. Shepherding, Whybrow writes, is not so much a way of life as a “way of being,” encompassing both wandering and home, isolation and community, uncertainty and joy. Over the decades, Whybrow’s flock experiences great dramas—stillbirths, coyote attacks—but their connection to the landscape sustains them. Less fortunate are the humans in their orbit, among them Whybrow’s mother, who, afflicted with dementia, must leave her own home for an assisted-living facility. Whybrow is uniquely positioned to understand what humans have lost in severing their bond with nature, yet her message is more hopeful than bleak: healing, she writes, “is not about returning to what was, but about accepting the change and adapting to the brokenness.” The New Yorker, Best Books of 2025
"I honestly can’t think of other contemporary writers who can engage with thorny plants and thorny social issues with such humble grace, and then turn around and tell you why it all matters. It’s a voice that comes from living the work. What I like is how consistently and quietly surprising it is, built on understandings that come only after years of careful observation, understandings that burst the cliches of so much nature writing. Rather than the tradition of Thoreau and Emerson, it feels like it descends from the line of myriad women who have anonymously sung the songs of their cultures across countless times and landscapes, and speaks to the women to come." —Rowan Jacobsen
National Book Award Longlist
New England Book Award Finalist
PBS NewsHour Summer Reading Recommendation
Featured on NPR’s Fresh Air
An Esquire "Best Books of Summer 2025
***
“Like James Rebanks’ The Shepherd’s View, The Salt Stones offers widespread appeal to a large audience. Readers will likely find it the perfect tonic for these turbulent times, and yet, with Whybrow’s keen awareness of so many aspects of our world, she never shuts her eyes to what hurts.” — Bookpage, starred review
“With her deliberate and revelatory narrative voice, Whybrow leads readers into a deeper recognition of how the sublime and the sinister grow side by side; how everything in [the] meadow is worth observing.” —Maureen Corrigan, The Washington Post
“[Whybrow’s] prose is alive with detail but never noisy or flashy. In witnessing the hard but simple work of shepherding these animals, readers will feel themselves somehow tended to.” —Kate Tuttle, The Boston Globe
“Helen Whybrow is a to-the-bone writer, and this is a to-the-bone book—beautiful, real, full of life.” —Bill McKibben
”Riveting, breath-taking, intensely powerful—The Salt Stones pulses with life. I deeply love this wise and beautiful book.” —Janisse Ray
Find The Salt Stones in hardcover at your favorite indie bookstore or online bookseller nationwide.
You can also purchase from the publisher and support Milkweed Editions, or order a signed copy from Helen’s Knoll Farm.
“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.”
In the heart of Vermont’s Green Mountains, Helen Whybrow and her partner set out to restore an old two-hundred-acre farm. Knowing that “belonging more than anything requires participation,” they begin to intertwine their lives with the land. But soon after releasing a flock of Icelandic sheep onto the worn-out fields, Whybrow realizes that the art of shepherding extends far beyond the flock and fences of Knoll Farm.
In prose both vivid and lean, The Salt Stones offers an intimate and profoundly moving story of what it means to care for a flock and truly inhabit a piece of land. The shepherd’s life unfolds for Whybrow in the seasons and cycles of farming and family—birthing lambs, fending off coyotes, rescuing lost sheep in a storm, and raising children while witnessing her mother’s decline. Exploring the interdependence of animals, as well as of the earth and ourselves, Whybrow reflects on the ways sheep connect her to place, to herself and to the ancient practice of shepherding.
Evocative, affectionate, and illuminating, The Salt Stones sings of a way of life that is at once ancient and entirely contemporary, inspiring us all to seek greater intimacy and a sense of belonging wherever our home place may be.
Order Now:
The Audio Edition of The Salt Stones is available on all your favorite listening platforms.
Follow Helen on Substack
Occasional essays, reflective and vivid, full of the unexpected, about a life lived close to the land, animals and the seasons.