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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2015
HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,
1 London Bridge Street
London, SE1 9GF
Copyright © Sarah Lean 2015
Illustrations © Gary Blythe 2015
Cover photographs © Mark harris (dog), Cavan images / Getty images (boy), Shutterstock (all other images)
Sarah Lean asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of the work.
Gary Blythe asserts the moral right to be identified as the illustrator of the work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007512263
Ebook Edition © 2015 ISBN: 9780007512256
Version: 2015-02-05
“Sarah Lean weaves magic and emotion into beautiful stories.”
Cathy Cassidy
“Touching, reflective and lyrical.”
The Sunday Times
“… beautifully written and moving. A talent to watch.”
The Bookseller
“Sarah Lean’s graceful, miraculous writing will have you weeping one moment and rejoicing the next.”
Katherine Applegate, author of The One and Only Ivan
For my little sister
Contents
Copyright
Praise for Sarah Lean
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Sarah Lean
About the Publisher
It must have snowed on the mountain in the night.
“Have you seen it yet, Frank?” I shouted downstairs.
“You mean did I hear?”
“I know, funny, isn’t it? The snow’s so quiet but it’s making all the animals noisy.”
We didn’t normally see snow on Canigou in May, and it made the village dogs bark in that crazy way dogs do when something is out of place. Harry, Frank’s donkey, was down in his shed, chin up on the half open door, calling like a creaky violin.
Frank came up to the roof terrace where I’d been sleeping in the hammock. He leaned over the red tiles next to me and we looked at Canigou, sparkling at the top like a jewellery shop.
And it’s the kind of thing that is hard to describe, when snow is what you can see while the sun is warming your skin. How did it feel? To see one thing and feel the complete opposite? I only knew that other things didn’t seem to fit together properly at the moment either; that my mother and Frank seemed as far apart as the snow and the sun.
“Frank, at school Madame was telling us that the things we do affect the environment, you know, like leaving lights on, things like that,” I said. “Well, I left the lights on in the girls’ loo.”
Frank smiled. Frank was my mother’s boyfriend, but that won’t tell you what he meant to me at all. He’d lived in our guesthouse next door for three years and he wouldn’t ever say the things to me that Madame had said when I forgot to turn the lights off. In fact, what he did was leave a soft friendly silence, so I knew I could ask what I wanted to ask, because I wasn’t sure about the whole environment thing.
“Did I make it snow on Canigou?”
“Leave the light on and see if it snows again,” he whispered, grinning.
He made the world seem real simple, like a little light switch right under my fingertips. But there were other complicated things.
“Remember when the cherry blossom fell