This beautiful and melancholic novella, set in the Glarner mountains in Switzerland, is told from the viewpoint of a child whose innocence of the world is combined with an acute sense of the danger present beneath the harmony of nature. Seven-year-old Katharina Ryhner is sent up the mountain to stay with her grandmother while her mother gives birth to her sixth child. It rains everyday and all the talk is of the danger of landslides. The little girl worries. When the time comes to go home, Katharina, filled with an increasing and inexplicable sense of doom, refuses to leave. Then, hearing a deafening thunderclap, she looks down the valley: a huge chunk of the mountainside is hurtling towards her home.