The Salt Stones: A Shepherd’s World, a Shepherd’s Mind

An Esquire ＂Best Books of Summer 2025＂

＂Helen Whybrow is a to-the-bone writer, and this is a to-the-bone book--beautiful, real, full of life.＂--Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature

Set in Vermont’s Green Mountains, a profoundly moving meditation on the lessons and wisdom that come from raising a family, tending sheep, and living close to the land.

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 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.

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. She is also the editor of many anthologies, including Hearth: A Global Conversation on Community, Identity, and Place and Coming to Land in a Troubled World. Her writing has appeared in Cagibi, Hunger Mountain, EatingWell, and Orion. She has been a visiting faculty member at Middlebury College and the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference. She lives in the Green Mountains of Vermont, where she shepherds a two-hundred-acre organic farm.