A Far Country draws you into a world of drought and deprivation where 14 year old Isabel leaves her drought-stricken village to head for the city to live with her cousin, to earn some money and particularly to find her adored, older brother, Isaias. Daniel Mason, author of The Piano Tuner, quickly draws you into her journey of discovery with his powerful descriptions of the rural area, ‘the backlands’ where the people have to mix soil with their food to make it go further and the shanty town in the city, ‘the settlements’ where pollution and violence abound. Isabel’s experience of both is told with an intensity and feeling that draws the reader into her suffering. Isabel is so close to her brother that she can feel his presence when he is near and they communicate without speaking but when she gets to the settlements, her ‘sixth sense’ seems to desert her in the chaos of city life and her search for her brother becomes increasingly frantic. A powerful read.
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
