Rock Crystal

On a frozen Christmas Eve in the Austrian Alps, two children wander away from their grandmother's cottage and into a landscape that will not let them go. Conrad and his sister Sanna meant only to cross the mountain path to reach their own home, but the snow has other plans. What begins as a simple journey becomes a night-long ordeal trapped among the glittering ice formations of a glacier, where the beauty is absolute and the cold is absolute and the world seems to forget they exist. Adalbert Stifter wrote this novella in 1853, and it has haunted readers ever since. Thomas Mann called it a masterpiece. W.H. Auden saw in it a parable about humanity's relationship with the earth. The prose is clean as ice, the mountain descriptions are both terrifying and holy, and the children's ordeal becomes something between a fairy tale and a prayer. This is a book about being small in a vast, silent place and finding out what you are made of. For readers who loved The Snowman or any story where the line between wonder and danger blurs until you cannot tell where one ends and the other begins.