A Little Boy Lost

In a world before the modern age, a boy named Martin grows up in a remote corner of the countryside where the wilderness presses close against the cottage walls. His father builds furniture by hand, his mother frets over his restless spirit, and the fields and forests beyond their door hold an almost unbearable allure for a child whose curiosity cannot be contained. What begins as ordinary childhood adventures, a close call with a snake, long days lost in imagined kingdoms, soon deepens into something stranger and more dangerous. As Martin grows older, the pull of the wild becomes irresistible, leading him into encounters with mirage and mystery, beauty and peril. Hudson captures something universal in this portrait of a boy who cannot help but wander toward the edge of the map, toward the place where the known world gives way to the unknown. This is a book for anyone who remembers what it felt like to be young and certain that the trees were watching, that something lay just beyond the next hill, waiting.