A grieving child walks between worlds in this haunting 1905 allegorical novel. After her mother's death, young Deborah remains on the farm with her father, tending to the harsh rhythms of rural life. But beyond the stark cold landscape, spirits convene in luminous council to debate fate, mortality, and the nature of human suffering. Deborah becomes the unlikely fulcrum where earthly hardship meets metaphysical speculation: her simple love for her father, her grief, her animal companions all weighed against the abstract forces that determine human destiny. Allonby constructs a daring double narrative, cutting between the intimate, earthbound particulars of a family in crisis and the cold philosophical deliberations of invisible powers. The result is neither simple fantasy nor straightforward realism, but something stranger: a meditation on how invisible forces shape visible lives, and how a child's stubborn faith might offer what spirits cannot. Those drawn to early mystical fiction, to Christian allegory refracted through modernist sensibility, will find in Deborah's journey a strange and affecting beauty.
