The Place of Tides by James Rebanks: Ducking out of my midlife worries … by moving to an island with an elderly woman I’d met for half an hour

The Place of Tides by James Rebanks (Allen Lane £22, 304pp) The Shepherd's Life, which told the story of one family's hill farm in Cumbria, was a surprise bestseller in 2015.

Writing in spare but beautiful prose, James Rebanks described a way of life that is increasingly rare nowadays as agriculture becomes ever more mechanised and large-scale.

Now 50, his latest book, The Place Of Tides, finds him at a crossroads after the death of his father. 'It wasn't just that I was tired,' he writes. 'I was lost . . . I felt overwhelmed, and angry at everyone around me. I was in trouble and I didn't know what to do about it.'

On impulse, he fired off a letter to Anna, a Norwegian woman he had met a decade ago, asking if he could travel to Norway and spend the summer with her.

Although they had only spent half an hour together, Rebanks had been mesmerised by Anna when he had met her on a conservation fact-finding trip to the Vega Archipelago, which lies off the Norwegian coast, just south of the Arctic Circle.

He spoke no Norwegian and Anna had only limited English, yet he had felt an instant bond with her. 'There was something alive in her that had died in me,' he writes.

Anna, known as 'the duck woman', had, for many years, spent late spring and early summer on a tiny island, caring for the scores of wild eider duck who waddled on to dry land to hatch their chicks.

Once the birds had left, she collected and sold their highly prized feathers, known as eiderdown, which the female ducks had plucked from their breasts to line their nests. Like hill farming in Cumbria, Anna's was a traditional way of life that was hanging on by a thread.

Anna replied to his letter saying that this would be her last season on the duck island and if he wanted to come, he should come quickly and bring work clothes and good boots.

A few days later he was standing on her doorstep, 'painfully aware that we didn't speak the same language, and that this might be a terrible idea for us both'.

Rebanks and Anna set off by boat to the island of Fjæroy (pronounced Fi-aroy), along with Ingrid, a slightly mysterious friend of Anna's who Rebanks thought must have come along to translate. The three of them settled into a wooden house with an outside toilet and no running water.

The island seemed permanently rain-lashed. Anna and Ingrid knitted while Rebanks read Moby-Dick and brooded about whether leaving his daughter in charge of the farm had been a dreadful mistake, and whether he had messed things up with his wife, Helen.

Perhaps he had been 'a little too much like Captain Ahab, a little too desperate to catch my whale, and everyone else had been dragged across the seven seas behind me'.

He was relieved when the work finally started: clearing away old nests, airing the wooden duck huts and nesting boxes which helped protect the ducks from predators such as sea eagles and crows, and remaking the nests using dried seaweed.

Rebanks didn't know how old Anna was – he guessed in her 70s –but he soon realised that her health was failing and that Ingrid was being lined up to take over the job of 'duck woman' the next season.

Waiting for the ducks to come ashore was 'like that scene in The Longest Day where German soldiers wait in Normandy for the D-Day invasion'.

Finally, the ducks arrived, the brown females bobbing next to the white males, 'feathers ruffling in the shallow water'.

Soon more than a hundred of them were nesting all over the island.

Every morning Rebanks and the two women inspected the nests and counted the eggs, which are green and twice as heavy as a hen's egg.

As soon as the chicks had hatched, the ducks and their young were off back to sea, leaving behind a nest full of light, fluffy, almost weightless feathers.

As generations of her ancestors had done, Anna collected and painstakingly cleaned this so-called 'islander's gold', which would then be sold as a filling for eiderdown duvets.

Although not very much happens from day to day, The Place Of Tides is a surprisingly gripping read and Rebanks excels at describing the raw beauty of the island.

One day, Anna casually remarked that there was a whale nearby. Rebanks rushed to look and saw a killer whale, 'so big it filled the window', cruising round the bay as part of a pod.

Rebanks is struck by Anna's fierce determination to protect this fragile ecosystem – she grumpily discourages anyone from visiting them there – and learns that it was largely thanks to her and a group of other women that Unesco has recognised this seascape as a World Heritage Site.

'She gave people courage to be more than they had yet dared to be, just by being herself,' he marvels.

When Rebanks, Anna and Ingrid left Fjæroy after 70 days, the three of them had become so close that it felt as if 'our island family is coming to an end'.

He was relieved that Anna was looking healthier and was at peace with her decision to hand over the reins to Ingrid.

As for Rebanks himself, his time on the island had profoundly affected him. He vowed to stop striving so much and instead to work with his family to make his farm the most beautiful and abundant place it could be, so that 'when my time was up, I would know I had done my best. I would have lived like Anna'.