A Far Country
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
When they spoke of it in town, they called it simply the city, as if it was the only city in the world ...
Raised in a remote village on the edge of a sugarcane plantation, Isabel was born with the gift and curse of 'seeing farther'. When drought and war grip their land, her beloved brother Isaias joins a great exodus to a teeming, labyrinthine city in the south. Soon the fourteen-year-old Isabel follows, forsaking the only home she's ever known, her sole consolation the thought of being with her brother again. But when she arrives, she discovers that Isaias has disappeared. Weeks and then months pass, until one day, armed only with her unshakeable hope, Isabel descends into the chaos of the city to find him.
Told with extraordinary empathy, richly evocative, the story of Isabel's quest - of her dignity and determination, her deeply spiritual world - becomes a universal tale about the bonds of family and a sister's love for her brother, about being caught between two worlds, and about true heroism. A tour de force of emotional and narrative power, it is destined to become a classic.
'Mason is a superb storyteller. He inhabits Isabel's mind with fine sensitivity, and cleverly uses his imaginary setting to write of dauntless, timeless love and loyalty' - The Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this flat but intermittently intriguing follow-up to his bestselling debut, The Piano Tuner, Mason takes readers to two impoverished locales in an unnamed, possibly South American (and heavily Catholic) country: a rural area known as the backlands, and the Settlements, the poor outskirts of a large city. When drought and deprivation become overwhelming in the backlands, 14-year-old Isabel is sent by her family to live with relatives in the Settlement. Her older brother, Isaias, moved to the city several months earlier, and Isabel expects a happy reunion; however, he has gone missing. As Isabel tends to her cousin's baby and adjusts to the chaotic city life, the search for Isaias becomes her obsession, demanding all of her resources including what may be psychic powers. The story's settings fail to evoke a distinct world; the backlands seem taken from the 1930s American Dust Bowl, while the city with its nonspecific political corruption, simmering class tensions, and the popularity of saints, soccer and soap operas among its residents is a grab bag of regional clich s. Mason's strength is in description, and though his accounts of severe weather reach a visceral peak, Isabel is primarily an observer. Readers may be wooed by the prose, but the story is a snoozer.
