Sheep Diary

A university literature professor moves to the countryside with his family to take up sheep farming. He leaves his life as a young urban intellectual to immerse himself in a completely different world—the world of sheep—and discovers that building a relationship with them can be as complex as reading Proust.
This book-cum-diary captures short reflections and at times almost existential musings based on austere observations of daily activities that form a necessary part of (rural) life, as well as on deep thoughts about the psychology of a flock of sheep. From the realisation that what seems simple can in fact be immensely complex and diverse, a new—and yet ancient—life wisdom emerges, unpretentious and free of any pomposity, romanticism or cliché. It is therefore somewhat surprising, but gradually becomes more and more self-evident. It is the wisdom of a man who thinks about life, but whose feet are firmly on the ground in his reflections, so much so that he is not afraid to admit that perhaps he does not own the sheep, but that the sheep own him.Axel Lindén (1972) debuted in 2017 with this very book, Fårdagboken (Sheep Diary), a reflection on the life of an academic shepherd. The book has been sold in eight languages and has garnered enthusiastic reviews on both sides of the Atlantic. Lindén now lives with his family on a farm in southern Sweden. Their house is heated with fir and pine trees (his second book, Tillstand /Every Other Fir, Every Other Pine/ was published in 2020).