A Far Country is set in an unnamed third-world country where fourteen-year-old Isabel lives in a remote village near a sugarcane plantation. She was born with a second sight where she can see things not in her immediate presence, but her mother performed a ceremony to close her to that world. A drought is upon the village and starvation and hunger are constant. Isabel's brother, Isaias, has already left for the big city looking for work, and she decides to follow him and stay with her cousin. When she arrives at her cousin's place in the slum on the outskirts of the city, she finds her brother gone and his whereabouts unknown. Isabel discovers that while the city might offer opportunities the countryside doesn't have, it doesn't have the sense of family and community that offers daily protection and solace. Driven by an obsession to find her brother and using powers of perception that seem to be returning, she plunges into the city in search of him. The second novel from Daniel Mason (
The Piano Tuner) has received mostly positive reviews with the San Jose Mercury News saying, "Nevertheless, in its alternations between bleakness and hope,
A Far Country is keenly perceived, richly imagined and delicately felt."
