English Pastoral: An Inheritance - The Sunday Times bestseller from the author of The Shepherd's Life

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Following the recent Agriculture Bill it seems that farmers will be paid only if they enhance the environment. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. The power of English Pastoral lies not just in the passion and eloquence of its prose or the clarity of its argument. As he points out, there’s a thin line between utopianism and bullshit, and “beauty doesn’t pay the bills”.

The first section entitled Nostalgia sets out how farming in these difficult conditions came to be seen as no longer sustainable. Deeply personal but also global in significance, its pages course with love and concern so palpable I more than once wept while reading it.Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian View image in fullscreen Sisyphus with a smile … James Rebanks with his Herdwick sheep in Cumbria.

But it is also uplifting : Rebanks is determined to hang on to his Herdwicks, to keep producing food, and to bring back the curlews and butterflies and the soil fertility to his beloved fields. This book can be approached at several differing levels: as a history of food production and farming in the uplands of Britain, as a fascinating insight into a precarious livelihood on the margins of economic production, or as simply an engaging tale of life in the Lake District beyond the tourist trail. The story he tells is one of hard work, little money and narrow horizons, reminiscent of Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie but without the adolescent sex and occasional violence.Instead of abandoning large areas of farmland to nature, Rebanks argues, we need to make productive farms better places for wildlife.

Four generations of his family building on centuries of their farming in the Cumbrian Fells gives us a poetic, practical, raw and almost miraculously detailed picture of this ancient way of life struggling to survive and to be reborn. But he has put his environmental ideals into practice by planting 12,000 trees, rerouting the river across his land to create wetland areas, dispensing with pesticides, and sacrificing arable land to encourage wildlife. By becoming slaves to consumerism and “strangers to the fields that feed us”, we’re part of the problem.It tells of how rural landscapes around the world were brought close to collapse, and how the age-old rhythms of work, weather, community and wild things were lost. To earlier generations of farmers, the idea that nature is vulnerable would have “seemed like hippy or communist propaganda”. His bestselling memoir of five years ago, The Shepherd’s Life, told the story of his work with Herdwick sheep, against the backdrop of his unlikely progress from schoolboy dropout to high-flying Oxbridge graduate. For Rebanks, farming and writing have proved complementary: while working long hours on the land, he has produced a book in a pastoral tradition that runs from Virgil to Wendell Berry. He makes no bones about the hardness of the life and his frustration at having to earn money outside the farm to make ends meet.