Storm Pegs: A Life Made in Shetland by Jen Hadfield review - 'a book to be read slowly, while savouring the details'

Now Jen Hadfield, a fine English-born poet, who has made her home in Shetland for 17 years, has written a rich and loving memoir of her life there. She may once have been a “sooth-moother” but she is surely a Shetlander now. As a poet she is in love with Shetland speech and one of the many charms of this book is its rich and fascinating glossary. She dislikes thinking of Shetlandic as a dialect; it is the speech of the islands, distinct to itself, recalling that the Northern Isles were Norse for at least as long as they have been Scottish, and draws also on Dutch and German thanks to long commercial links with Denmark, the Low Countries and the Hanseatic League.

An old distinction between Orkney and Shetland is that Orcadians are farmers who fish and Shetlanders fishers who farm. It holds true. Everything in Shetland is related to the sea and the land has none of Orkney's fecundity. Shetland is a land battered by the violence of waves and wind, but also one of endless summer evenings where the light scarcely dies away. It is, of necessity, but also of long inclination, a land where people care for each other. For Shetlanders, Hadfield remarks, it is London, not Shetland that is a remote place. Indeed, while commending the understanding shown by Walter Scott in his Shetland-based novel The Pirate, she observes that remoteness is in the eyes only of those who cannot see things as they are.

Much of her book is an account of her daily life, of enduring storms and working with neighbours – learning from them too – and of a rich cultural life of beachcombing, of fishing and sea birds, of winter swimming in wetsuits, of eating and drinking, music, poetry and storytelling. Of course there are changes – Shetland is no Brigadoon. The largest onshore wind farm in Europe is being built; Shetland will survive that just as it has survived the oil boom and profited from it. Shetlanders are resourceful.

This is not a book to be galloped through; it is to be read slowly, while savouring the details. It offers a rich portrait of island life and of the people. There is much to delight, much to learn from it too – for instance, how to gut a fish cleanly and without waste. You will also learn that at New Year “the custom is to do a little bit of all the things you hope to do over the coming year.” You approach them “peerie wyse” – “little by little” – surely not a bad way to go about life. Anyway, that is surely a good way, the best way indeed, to read this book. You may choose to think of it as a travel book, which for many it must be, an opening on new experience. Shetland is full of surprises. It is an old culture that contrives to be at once rooted in the past, vital in the present and open-eyed to the future. Jen Hadfield has a mind which, like Shetland itself, is richly worth exploring. Anyone who already knows Shetland will enjoy this book; anyone who doesn't know Shetland will have it lodged in the imagination after reading.

Storm Pegs: A Life Made in Shetland, by Jen Hadfield, Picador, £18.99. Jen Hadfield is at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 13 August