Accompanied by Torin of the Fire Folk, Rebecca Bloom returns to Earth to be reunited with her family and to continue the planetary healing process begun on Thianely. Her newfound abilities affect not only family members, but everyone else she encounters, including the many Thianelians living on Earth incognito. With the aid of her companions, Rebecca battles the sinister forces that intend to disrupt the balance between worlds.
First published in 1885, The Purple Land was the first novel of William Henry Hudson, author of Green Mansions. The Anglo-Argentine naturalist distinguished himself both as one of the finest craftsmen of prose in English literature and as a thinker on ecological matters far ahead of his time. The Purple Land is the exuberant, often wryly comic, first-person account of a young Englishman’s imprudent adventures, set against a background of political strife in nineteenth-century Uruguay. Eloping with an Argentine girl, young Richard Lamb makes an implacable enemy of his teenage bride’s father. Leaving her behind, he goes ignorantly forth into the interior of the country to seek his fortune and is eventually imprisoned and persecuted by the vengeful father. His narrative closes as he sets off on still another impetuous quest. This facsimile of the 1904 Three Sirens Press edition includes striking woodcuts by Keith Henderson illustrating the characters in the novel and the fauna of Uruguay. Ilan Stavans’s introduction offers an opportunity to revisit The Purple Land as a "road novel" in which an outsider offers reflections on nationality and diasporic identity.
The Purple Land is a novel that sets in 19th-century Uruguay by William Henry Hudson, first published in 1885 under the title The Purple Land that England Lost. Initially a commercial and critical failure, it was reissued in 1904 with the full title The Purple Land, Being One Richard Lamb's Adventures in the Banda Orientál, in South America, as told by Himself. Towards the end of the novel, the narrator explains the title, "I will call my book The Purple Land. For what more suitable name can one find for a country so stained with the blood of her children?"
This story was started years ago when my daughter was very young. Her favorite color was purple, and one day on the way home from errands I began to compose the story with her. Years later, she revised the story for a school English project and now it's revised again for this book. The story is dear to us and holds a permanent place in her baby book. We hope you enjoy it as well. It is a testimony to the rich beauty in the world and in the people around us.~ Dema
