Heidi

Five-year-old Heidi, orphaned and unwanted, is carried up a Swiss mountain and left with the one relative who will take her: a gruff, solitary old man the village calls the Alm-Uncle, who has long since quarrelled with his neighbours and gone to live alone on the high alp. Everyone expects the arrangement to fail.

Instead the child blossoms. Heidi takes to the mountain as though born to it — to the goats, the hay-bed under the roof, the cheese toasted at the fire, the wind in the fir-trees, the peaks that burn red at sunset. She befriends Peter the goatherd and his blind grandmother, and slowly, in the warmth of a child who simply loves him, the old man's frozen heart begins to thaw.

Then Heidi is taken away to Frankfurt, to be companion to Clara Sesemann, a wealthy motherless girl who cannot walk. In the great shuttered house, under the stern eye of the housekeeper Fräulein Rottenmeier, she is fed and clothed and taught her letters — and begins to waste away from a homesickness so deep she walks in her sleep. Only the mountain can cure her. And the mountain, in time, gives back more than it took.

Tender, vivid, and quietly profound, Heidi is a story about where we belong, about the healing power of open air and love, and about the thawing of a hard old heart. More than a century on, it remains one of the best-loved books ever written for children.