Helen Whybrow, The Salt Stones, in conversation with Craig Popelars

***Sarah G. and Keebe cannot recommend this book enough.***

A PBS NewsHour Summer Reading Recommendation

Featured on NPR’s Fresh Air

An Esquire “Best Books of Summer 2025”

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 and Dead Reckoning. She is also the editor of the anthologies Hearth and Coming to Land in a Troubled World. Her writing has appeared in Cagibi, Hunger Mountain, EatingWell, and Orion. She lives in Vermont’s Green Mountains, where she shepherds a two-hundred-acre organic farm.

Craig Popelars is the Vice President of Marketing & Sales for Milkweed Editions. A thirty-year publishing veteran, Craig previously served as the Publisher of Tin House Books in Portland, Oregon and as the Associate Publisher and Marketing & Sales Director of Algonquin Books. During his publishing tenure, he has published and promoted critically acclaimed and bestselling authors including Julia Alvarez, Ross Gay, Tayari Jones,and Gabrielle Zevin .At the beginning of his publishing career, he cut his teeth as a bookseller at McIntyre’s Books and sold many, many copies of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.