Katharina is sent out of the valley, up the mountain to stay with her grandmother while her mother gives birth. The little girl is worried. In her parents inn all the talk has been of the landslides and it has not stopped raining in days. When the time comes for her to return home, Katharina, filled with an inexplicable sense of doom, refuses to go. Soon afterwards she hears a deafening thunderclap. She looks into the valley. A huge chunk of the mountainside is hurtling down towards her village. This is a beautiful, melancholy novella about a natural catastrophe, made more dramatic by its basis on the historical truth of what happened to the village of Elm in 1881. Told from the viewpoint of a child, it is a hymn to the loss suffered in disaster and to the beauty of the landscape from which the violence erupted.
- ISBN10 1860467121
- ISBN13 9781860467127
- Publish Date 19 July 2001
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 12 August 2014
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Vintage Publishing
- Imprint The Harvill Press
- Format Paperback (UK Trade)
- Pages 130
- Language English