The Map of Leaves

The village of Thorn Creek should have been abandoned long ago. It was a shivering, damp, dead end of a place, where wooden houses huddled together along a marshy river, as though afraid they would fall into the churning stream or else be swallowed up by the forest. It was not a place for children, out among the foggy woods and wild marshes. The winters were long and dark and impossibly grey; and no one in the little village looked forward to spending their days swamped by river mist, wrapped in two woolly jumpers, stacking firewood and collecting fallen pears. No one except Orla Carson.