Flotsam, Jetsam, Healing

IN 2011, shortly after the birth of her first child, Sally Huband moved from Aberdeenshire on the Scottish mainland to the Shetland Islands, where her husband a helicopter pilot in the North Atlantic and North Sea oil-and gas industry-was stationed.

- KARIN ALTENBERG

It was not an easy move. Ms. Huband had recently left a diverting career in nature conservation. Now she was spending many hours alone with her son, and shortly afterward a baby daughter, while her husband was off working.

As Ms. Huband recounts in "Sea Bean," the initial experience left her feeling "unmoored by motherhood." The sense of confinement was sharpened by the northerly storms, sometimes so fierce that she could hardly open the front door. Then she begins to suffer from debilitating pain-palindromic rheumatism, brought on by pregnancy-that turns her isolation into an imprisonment.

Her language reflects the pain. The wind "flenses" the warmth from the light of the sun and "scalps" the crests from the waves. But Shetland has a life-force of its own: "Living in Shetland can feel," Ms. Huband writes, "like riding through the immensity of an ocean."

Soon the tide pulls her down to the beaches, where walking is not too demanding or painful. She volunteers in a beached bird survey, and the searching for dead seabirds along the strandlines opens the door to beachcombing as a way of discovering this new landscape and extending views to distant places.