As a boy, James Rebanks was taught by his grandfather to work the land the old way. Their family farm in England's Lake District hills was part of an ancient agricultural landscape: a patchwork of crops and meadows, of pastures grazed by livestock, and of hedgerows teeming with wildlife. The men and women had vanished from the fields;; the old stone barns had crumbled; the skies have emptied of birds and their windblown song. Hailed as a "brilliant, beautiful book" by the Sunday Times, Pastoral Song(published in the United Kingdom under the title English Pastoral) is the story of an inheritance, one that affects us all. It tells of how rural landscapes around the world were brought close to collapse and of how the age-old rhythms of work, weather, community, and wild things were lost. And yet this elegy from the northern fells is also a song of hope--of how, guided by the past, one farmer began to salvage a tiny corner of England that was now his, doing his best to restore the life that had vanished and to leave a legacy for the future. This is a book about what it means to love and have pride in a place and about how, against all the odds, it may still be possible to build a new pastoral -- not a utopia, but somewhere decent for us all.

Originally published as English Pastoral in the United Kingdom in 2020 by Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Random House UK.