Books with title The far country

The story takes place partly in London and partly in Australia. It is set in 1950. Jennifer Morton, a young girl from Leicester but living in London, witnesses the death of her grandmother, the widow of a retired Indian civil servant. Her pension has ceased and she has literally starved to death, despite apparent prosperity. [clarification needed] Before she dies, she leaves Jennifer a small sum of money sent by a niece in Australia, and asks that Jennifer use the money to visit Jane and Jack Dorman who own a prosperous sheep station in Merrijig Victoria. She does so. Jennifer finds herself falling in love with the new, relatively unspoiled country, though she continues to worry about her parents. She also meets Carl Zlinter, a 'New Australian'; a Czech refugee who is working at the nearby lumber camp of a timber company as a condition of his free passage to Australia. A medical doctor qualified to practise in Czechoslovakia, he is not qualified to practise in Australia and only looks after First Aid at the lumber camp. But when an accident badly injures two of the workers and no doctor, nurse or medical facilities are available, he is faced with the choice of either watching the workers die or operating on them; he chooses to operate, and Jennifer assists him. The two operations are successful, but one man later gets drunk and dies. Zlinter is initially in potentially serious trouble over the unlicensed operations and death, but he is cleared of responsibility. Jennifer helps Zlinter to trace the history of a man of the same name who lived and died in the district many years before, during a gold rush, and they find the site of his house. Back in England, Jennifer's mother dies and she is forced to return, but she is now restless and dissatisfied. Zlinter turns up in Leicester; he has found gold dust that the earlier Zlinter earned as a bullock driver and hid beneath a stone. He has used the money from illegally selling the gold to travel to England to ask Jennifer to marry him, and to re-qualify as a medical practitioner.

*This Book is annotated (it contains a detailed biography of the author). *An active Table of Contents has been added by the publisher for a better customer experience. *This book has been checked and corrected for spelling errors. The Candy Country is about Lily who takes her mother's big red umbrella and ends up blown into Candy country. She finds herself going on more adventures through a land of gingerbread, cakes and cookies until ending up enjoying the land of wholesome bread. Her adventures teach her to become a good housekeeper and enjoy sweet only at Christmas time. How They Ran Away is about Tommy and Billy who decide one day to go off into the woods be become hunters. They have adventures along the way but find they are very much lost and separated from each other in the end. Two short children's stories with a moral...

Mordicai Gerstein's portrayal of Philippe Petit's high-wire walk between the towers of the World Trade Center, The Man Who Walked Between the Towers, won the 2004 Caldecott Medal and was among the most admired books of the year. Now comes a memorable new work, a novel of singular insight and imagination that transports readers to the Old Country, where "every winter was a hundred years and every spring a miracle...where the water was like music and the music was like water...where all the fairy tales come from, where there was magic, and there was war". There, Gisella stares a moment too long into the eyes of a fox, and she and the fox exchange shape. Gisella's quest to get her girl-body back takes her on a journey across a war-ravaged country that has lost its shape. She encounters sprites, talking animals, a chicken that lays a golden egg, a court with a spider for a judge...and bloodshed, destruction, and questions of power and justice. Finally, looking into the eyes of the fox once more, she faces a strange and startling choice about her own nature. The Old Country is at once timeless and contemporary, a tale that draws on a wealth of storytelling tradition and dramatizes the question of what it is to be human. Part adventure story, part fable; exciting, beautifully told, rich in humor and wisdom, it is the work of an artist and storyteller at the height of his powers.

The dark wood was green and gold - green where the oak trees stood crowded together with misshapen, twisted trunks, red-gold where the great smooth beeches lifted their branching arms to the sky. In between jostled silver birches - olive-tinted fountains which never reached the light-black spruces with little pale candles on each tip - and nut trees smothered to the neck in dense bracken. The bracken was a forest in itself, a curving verdant flood of branches, transparent as water by the path but thick, heavy, secret a foot or two away, where high ferny crests waved above the softly moving ferns, just as the beech tops flaunted above the rest of the wood. The rabbits which crept quietly in and out reared on their hind legs to see who was going by. They pricked their ears and stood erect and then dropped silently on soft paws and disappeared into the close ranks of brown stems when they saw the child. She walked along the rough path, casting fearful glances to right and left. She never ran, even in moments of greatest terror, when things seemed very near, for then they would know she was afraid and close round her. Gossamer stretched across the way from nut bush to bracken frond and clung to her cold cheeks. Spilt acorns and beech mast Iay thick on the ground, green and brown patterns in the upside-down red leaves, which made a carpet. Heavy rains had swept the soil to the lower levels of the path and laid bare the rock in many places. On a sandy patch she saw her own footprint, a little square toe and a horseshoe where the iron heel had sunk. That was in the morning, when all was fresh and fair. It cheered her to see the homely mark, and she stayed a moment to look at it and replace her foot in it, as Robinson Crusoe might have done. A squirrel, rippling along a leafy bough, peered at her and then, finding her so still, ran down the tree trunk and along the ground. Her step was strangely silent, and a close observer would have seen that she walked only on the soil between the stones of the footpath, stones of the earth itself, which had worn their way through the thin layer of grass. Her eyes and ears were as alert as those of a small wild animal as she slid through the shades in the depths of the wood....