As a person who loves Shetland, Jen Hadfield's book was instantly one I knew I'd love just as much. Hadfield's writing is so beautifully descriptive and you can picture the stunning landscapes and imagine yourself there as she is. It was so enjoyable to read about her journey of moving to Shetland and her experience as a sooth-moother before integrating herself slowly but surely into the community there - it's something I've thought about doing for a few years now so hearing someone else's experience was encouraging. I'd also love to read more from Hadfield as I enjoyed this so much so hope she releases something else in future.

Prior to reading this book my knowledge of Shetland came from two wonderful mystery series. They are the Jimmy Perez novels by Ann Cleeves and those written by Marsali Taylor. Both of these writers left me very curious about what life on Shetland is really like. So…I was completely delighted to receive this e galley. It did not disappoint.

This is the (true) story of a woman who moved to Shetland. Even better, this writer is a poet with a wonderful gift for words that make her life come to life.

Anyone who wants to spend time in Shetland will most definitely want to pick this title up!

Many thanks to NetGalley and Pan Macmillan-Picador for this title. All opinions are my own.

Artist and award-winning poet Jen Hadfield has lived on Shetland for 17 years, the Scottish archipelago located to the far, far north of the UK. After renting from a friend, Hadfield finally settled in Burra where she built a small house designed to blend with its surroundings. Although a sooth-moother (incomer) Hadfield soon became part of the local community, welcomed with bowls of soup and gifts of freshly-caught fish. Her account of her life in Shetland is episodic, she wanted to capture the essence of the place and the people in:

“…a series of micro-essays without a connecting narrative structure. [It] would just be moments of presentness, in place, and I wanted them to be as intense as I could possibly make them, almost a wee bit trippy in their intensity sometimes.”

I’m not sure if her book’s quite “trippy” but it’s certainly lyrical, although it’s also refreshingly grounded and unsentimental. She links the landscapes to the language, the ways in which Shetlaen – its origins close to old Norse – shapes an understanding of the earth, the sky, the wild things, and the passing of the seasons. The loose structure follows these seasons, although in Shetland the seasons are punctuated by events like the harvests, the rise of the mackerel, and the appearance of newborn lambs.

Hadfield adapts to the local ways, she forages with friends, grows artichokes and garlic which she trades with neighbours for their crops. She walks the land, paying attention to its sights, sounds, colours and textures – which she renders so well I could almost feel what it was like to be there. She learns the language, makes friends, and adopts two cats. Her musings on her existence are threaded through with snippets of local folklore, details of the wildlife on shore and sea, and Shetland's rich history: a visit to the small island Foula yields stories of the ropes made from women’s hair, passed down from generation to generation, used to descend steep cliffs in search of limpets or birds’ eggs to supplement frugal diets. Hadfield charts too the less idyllic aspects of island living: the harsh winds and the cold that leave her riddled with chilblains; the fogs that can suddenly halt the ferry and cut her off from the shops; and the relentless flood of garbage that washes up from passing ships and often chokes small animals and birds. Overall, Hadfield’s writing constructs a haunting celebration of place and of community, of land where ancient and modern intertwine, and sometimes clash.

Very good, great sense of place but seemed to run out of steam from around half way.
Writing about living in 'remote places' is becoming an overcrowded market and you need to stand out. I'm not at all sure that this book does!

A luminous recentring of a place that gets bigger the closer you look

Hadfield's loving and dense book, equal parts autobiography and paean to her island home, is an answer to the question 'Where am I?' but Hadfield's radical refocusing of the Edge to the Centre is intertwined with the as urgent question of 'Who am I?'

Often described as remote, Shetland comes into wild detail under Hadfield's poet eyes, getting larger and deeper the more that she and we explore the islands. It reminded me of John Crowley's similarly dense novel Little, Big, where getting closer to the landscape reveals an even larger world beyond, full of mysteries and delights.

Alongside the cast of friends, neighbours and tourists, Shetland is another visceral character, a geologic mother, a sleeping giant, harried by the other major characters that colour the narrative, the sea and the weather. They are as they should be, neither inimical nor anthropomorphised, simply a part of the world that Hadfield soothes herself into, like a limpet on a rock.

I imagine the trickle of women's narratives of life in other places is one response to the boundaries that Covid-19 imposed on us, but I'm loving seeing the world through eyes that I cannot even imagine.

Four and a half stars, rounded up to five.

I have reviewed Storm Pegs by Jen Hadfield for book recommendation and selling site LoveReading.co.uk. I’ve chosen it as a LoveReading Star Book and a Liz Pick of the month for July. Please see the link for the full review. Thank you.

A lovely escapist read. Biographies where someone moves to somewhere remote to get away from their former life are always fascinating. This one certainly is. Poet Jen Hadfield goes to Shetland for a visit and makes it her home. Parts of it almost read like a poem. There are some lovely similes, such as pelicans 'cruising about like painted boats in an amusement park. She talks vividly about the weather (often inclement), her neighbours (who make her welcome) and the scenery (beautiful). I've been to both Shetland and the Orkney Isles as part of a cruise. When I went to Shetland it was sunny. The tour guide said it was the best day they'd had for weeks! A lovely place to visit, where everyone is friendly.

Every word of this book is beautiful, a long-form poem spinning out the world it's describing with unhurried loveliness. I really did enjoy dipping in and out of it. there's not really any structure. Faces and people and thoughts drift in and out, and it's hard to capture any single moment, and you could pretty much read the chapters in any order without noticing. Which is perhaps the point, the otherworldliness of a life in this place. But it also made it hard to get a foothold, or to be able to differentiate one bit/person/happening from the rest. Shetland is full of artists and people dropping fish off for each other, and you get to see otters and seals and swim in bioluminescent waves. It's also very good on seasickness, a reminder of why I'll probably carry on experiencing island life through reading about it!

Having personal worked for a company with offices in Shetland, I am used to stories or its beauty and harsh landscapes. So when I saw this book and read the synopsis I thought it would be a lovely read. Poet Jen Hadfield moved to the Shetland archipelago to start a new life and has obviously come to love the island she calls home very much. Shetland is a place of Vikings and myths, of ancient languages and old customs, of breathtaking landscapes and violent weather. and we get that and so much more whilst reading this book.

Jens writing is beautiful and it has made me just want to visit the Shetland Islands so much more that I did before. Jen arrives on the island and has to learn to live with its vastness and traditions and customs. Her writing made me feel the wind on my face and the salt spray of the sea on my lips. A truly remarkable story of her personal journey and self discovery.

Thank you to NetGalley and Pan Macmillan for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Storm Pegs A Life in Shetland by Jen Hadfield is a memoir from a poet who fell in love with the Shetland Islands and moved there. Each chapter starts with a word from The Shetland Dictionary and the author provides a story and context for the meaning. There are several dictionaries that exist for Shetland words, one of which is entirely dedicated to weather with 317 pages. This book shows how language adds depth and understanding to the feel and heart of a place. Community is important to the people of the Shetland Islands and it is a world of its own.

Hadfield describes her surroundings in great detail and with the prose that only a poet could see and write. “You can almost hold Shetland, like a poem, in your gaze at once; you can shake it like a snow globe in your mind.” With her descriptions, you definitely feel the cold wind on your face and the briny smell of the ocean. You feel like you are on the edge of the world but connected to elements and people that share the island with her. “I can feel the human light in me radiating out, like a storm lantern with the shutters opened.”

I would recommend this book for readers who want a tour of the Shetland Islands through a poet’s eyes. This book is an exploration of language, nature, and a woman’s journey to belonging.

Thank you Pan Macmillan and Netgalley for the advanced reader copy. All opinions are my own.

This book will be released July 11, 2024.

Storm Pegs is a lyrical memoir of life in Shetland. For Hadfield, nothing about Shetland is remote: it's a place that centres on connection. Using Shaetlan as a gateway, she explores this unique local rootedness and the complexities of having a deep-seated kinship with a place which is both ancient and every-changing, familiar and unknowable. In prose brimming with emotion she unpicks all the things that make the islands so special to her.

Whatever your own connection to Shetland, it is hard not to be swept up by Hadfield's open-throated love for the place.

An account of Jen Hadfield's years spent living in the Shetland Isles, this attempts to understand the people and islands through both a physical experience of creating a home there, but also an emotional connection through the language and how the people express themselves and the land they live on. This is an exploration of geography and place and where home is and what that feels like. I love that Hadfield returns again and again to the idea that most people have that Shetland is remote and how, in her own experience, it is a vital, central part of her being and that living there makes her feel like she is in the middle of everything and building connections that radiate outwards all the time. Poetry and practicality learn to sit side by side in this fascinating memoir.

A gorgeous book that brings Shetland to life on the page, with the author sharing a deep personal connection with the place with the reader. Great writing and the best kind of memoir.

Poetic, intense and beautiful. This was a moving glimpse into a life well loved.

Jen is a master of emotive and vividly connected storytelling.

I’ve just finished Storm Pegs and it was truly delightful. I’m a huge fan of anything related to Shetland so reading this book was a dream. Jen tells of the life and community she has on the island and how this changes throughout the seasons and as to why living here is so different from life off of a small, remote island. For me, the only thing that would have enriched my experience further would have been to listen to this on audiobook for the rich dialect of the Shetland words used and defined throughout the book. I need a physical copy of the book to go on my shelves now!

Die Shetlands sind eine Gruppe kleiner Inseln im äußersten Nordwesten Großbritanniens. Ein Sammelplatz für Sagen, alter Sprachen und Bräuche. Aber sie sind auch abhängig vom Wetter und oft durch Stürme vom schottischen Festland abgeschnitten. Das sind die Inseln, die sich Jen Hadfield Ende ihrer Zwanziger als ihre neue Heimat aussucht.

Was macht es mit jemandem, an den Rand der Welt zu ziehen? In eine eingeschworene Gemeinschaft, in der jeder Neuzugang heraussticht? Mich hat an der Schilderung der Menschen auf Shetland überrascht, wie offen sie waren. Auch wenn sie sich auf die nötigsten Worte beschränkten: Jen beschreibt ein Miteinander, das von gegenseitigem Respekt und Aufmerksamkeit geprägt ist. Aber auch von einem gewissen Abstand, den man sich lässt. Die Komfortzone des Anderen vorsichtig ausgelotet und immer respektiert.

Die Autorin zeigt mir eine Welt, die ganz anders ist als ich erwartet habe und doch genau so. Ich habe mir die Sheltands immer karg und einsam vorgestellt und das sind sie auf den ersten Blick auch. Auf den zweiten Blick liegt es gerade in dieser Kargheit eine Schönheit und die Autorin hat mir diesen zweiten Blick gewährt. Am Anfang jedes Kapitels stehen Begriffe, wie man sie nur auf den Inseln kennt und mit jedem neuen Begriff entführt sie mich ein bisschen tiefer in ihre Welt. Ihre Worte haben Bilder in meinem Kopf entstehen lassen. Deshalb habe ich das Buch entgegen meiner sonstigen Lesegewohnheit langsam gelesen. Über die Seiten zu fliegen wäre ihnen nicht gerecht geworden.

Jen muss keine großen Worte machen, um u erzählen. Ähnlich wie die Menschen auf den Shetlands beschränkt sie sich in ihrer Sprache nur auf das Nötigste und hat es mir überlassen, meine eigenen Schlüsse zu ziehen. Für mich hat ihr Stil perfekt zu den Inseln gepasst, die sie beschreibt.

Ich muss gestehen, dass ich mit dem Titel lange nichts anfangen konnte. Aber beim Lesen habe ich gelernt, dass es ein typischer Begriff ist: Storm Pegs sind Wäscheklammern, die auch im stärksten Sturm die Wäsche an der Leine halten. Eigentlich etwas Banales, aber es macht das Leben viel einfacher. So ist es mit vielem, was Jen Hadfield in ihrem Buch beschreibt: es sind nie die großen Dinge, aber ohne sie würde etwas fehlen.

Incredible at her craft, Jen Hadfield, writes about her life at Shetland, and proves that great writing is not about unexpected twists or twists for the sake of simply shocking the reader, nor is great memoirs about the author themselves. Putting the heart and soul of Shetland at its core, Hadfield’s writing transforms and transports the reader with the execution of details of every day life, adaptation, local slang, nature and community. I enjoyed every bit of it.

Storm Pegs by Jen Hadfield is an exceptionally beautifully written novel about what fell into place in her life to get her to move to Shetland. Her descriptions of the elements, weather changes and isolated living at times captured my curiosity of the reality of living amongst such complicated beauty.

I love this book. I fell into the rhythm of Jen’s writing style and I wish I could love to Shetland too!

This is such a beautiful book. It is about Jen Hadfields' life in Shetland over the course of about a year.

This book made me ache to see the places Jen so eloquently describes, from cold water swimming to hiking to cliffs, I felt I was there too.

This is a journey of discovery, about place, people, and self. It is understanding what people can do when they live "at the edge."

I had always thought the Shetland was a bit remote, but this challenged me to consider what remote really is.

Jen is a poet, which comes across in the magical use of her prose. I was laughing out loud in parts and weeping in others. I wished I had a paper version of the book to underline paragraphs about swearing, descriptions of the sea, and the beautiful Shetland words.

This made me want to visit even more, to take in the stunning beauty described and also, hopefully, catch a whisper or two of the Shetland language in use.

Storm Pegs by Jen Hatfield

A very good insight to changing your life and taking a very different path from what is seen as normal.
I loved the nature of it all and how she integrated into isle life.