The Stone Flood Author:Franz Hohler A beautiful, melancholy novella of natural catastrophe, based on a true event. Katharina is sent out of the valley and up the mountain to be with her grandmother while her mother gives birth to a sixth child. The little girl is worried. In her parents' inn all the talk has been of the landslides, and it has not stopped raining for days. At sc... more »hool, the priest has been telling the story of the Great Flood. When the baby is born and the time comes for her to return home, Katharina, filled with an inexplicable sense of doom, refuses to go. Soon afterward, she hears a deafening thunderclap. She looks into the valley: a huge chunk of the mountainside is hurtling down toward her village. The death of this village of Elm did occur, in 1881. This novel is a hymn to the loss suffered in that great natural disaster and to the beauty of the landscape from which the violence erupted. The Stone Flood, infused with the atmosphere of turn-of-the- century rural 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 beauty of nature.« less