The magazine Poets & Writers contains a section called Page One, which offers the first sentences of new books.  Good first sentences should pack a wallop and make you catch your breath.  Remember Gabriel García Márquez's famous first line in One Hundred Years of Solitude? "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." Who could stop reading after that tantalizing opening?

The first sentence of Daniel Mason's second novel, A Far Country (his first was the highly acclaimed The Piano Tuner),  reminded me of García Márquez's, not because it's as flamboyantly arresting but because it succinctly captures the haunting, bare–bones longing that threads through the book.  Here it is: "In the valley of the village they would one day name Saint Michael in the Cane, the men and women waited, turning the November soil and watching the sky."  They're waiting for rain.

But perhaps this makes the book sound tedious, which it isn't.  The story revolves around Isabel, a charmingly melancholy girl who lives with her extended family in Saint Michael, a city of dusty streets, whitewashed houses, and one decrepit statue.  Isabel has a brother, Isaias, who is seven years her senior.  They spend all their time together.  Isaias takes her on long walks in the hills.  He points out fish fossils in the rock and picks pink flowers for her hair.  He reads stories to her and plays his fiddle.  Isabel adores him, and she has an uncanny ability of always finding him, no matter where he is.

Then, drought and civil unrest descend upon them.  One by one, families bundle up their belongings and travel to the big city to the south, where they hear life is easy and jobs grow on trees.  Isabel's father is stubborn.  Once a cane–cutter, always a cane–cutter.  This plot of land is his, and he's here to stay.  To Isabel's consternation, Isaias sneaks away one night to make his fortune as a street entertainer in the big city.  Soon after, when the food is gone, Isabel follows, with her parents' blessing, to baby–sit her older cousin Manuela's baby, Hugo, while Manuela works as a maid downtown.

When Isabel arrives, Isaias is nowhere to be found.  Isabel waits for him, day after day.  Her despair grows palpable, and she goes to the authorities to report him missing.  When the inspector finds her frantically searching through foreign folders on his desk, he admonishes her, tells her people in the city disappear; that's what they do.  She runs out into the streets, frustrated, and, for the first time, notices missing–persons' flyers everywhere.  Had they really been here all along?

She left the line for the bus and approached it, it said MISSING and showed the face of a girl, and a name and a number.  As she looked at the girl, there came suddenly a sense of something tearing: a strange sense that seemed to have come to her from a far country, and she knew that this girl wouldn't be found, just like she had known what would happen to her second brother in the photo taken long ago.

Did you catch the title in there?  It's brilliantly slipped into the flow of the sentence. The "far country" is redolent of what C. S. Lewis in The Pilgrim's Regress called Sehnsucht, the "inconsolable longing" in the human heart for "we know not what":

It appeared to me therefore that if a man diligently followed this desire, pursuing the false objects until their falsity appeared and then resolutely abandoning them, he must come out at last into the clear knowledge that the human soul was made to enjoy some object that is never fully given—nay, cannot even be imagined as given—in our present mode of subjective and spatio–temporal experience. 

Lewis was referring to God, of course, and although Mason would probably not label his book as deeply spiritual, I found that Isabel's story was my own, and her quest carried me through to the very end.  Indeed, Mason has erased time and location details in the book so that it can be read as everyperson's story, with the timeless beauty of a slow, winding parable. He's a deft weaver of words.  If you can believe it, he is also finishing medical school at UC San Francisco—hence a reproach to all would–be novelists who say they "just don't have the time." I'm already looking forward to his third novel.

Elissa Elliott is a writer who lives in Rochester, Minnesota. She's at work on a novel about Eve.

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