The World According to Anna

by Jostein Gaarder, Donald Bartlett

Genres: Visionary & Metaphysical

Synopsis

When fifteen-year-old Anna begins receiving messages from another time, her parents take her to the doctor. But he can find nothing wrong with Anna; in fact he believes there may be some truth to what she is seeing.

Anna is haunted by visions of the desolate world of 2082. She sees her great-granddaughter, Nova, in a wasteland peopled by ragged survivors, after animals and plants have died out.

The more Anna sees, the more she realises she must act to prevent the future in her visions becoming real. But can she act quickly enough?

Haunting, gripping and magical, The World According to Anna is a fable for our time.

Read by Penelope Rawlins

Release date: November 12, 2015

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 240

Sample

On New Year’s Eve, for as long as Anna could remember, the families in her village had gone up to the mountain pastures on a sleigh. The horses had been groomed and dressed, and the sleighs had been adorned with bells and flaming torches to cut through the darkness. Sometimes a piste-basher was sent up in advance so that the horses wouldn’t get stuck in loose snow. But every New Year’s Eve without fail they went to the mountains, not on skis or scooters but on horse-drawn sleighs. Christmas was a magical experience, but it was this sleigh ride into the mountain meadows that was the real winter adventure.

New Year’s Eve was a special time. Normal rules did not apply, and everyone mixed freely. On that evening they left one year behind and entered the next. They stepped over an invisible boundary between what had been and what would be. Happy New Year! And thank you for the old one!

Anna loved this time of year. She couldn’t decide which part she liked the most: the ride up the mountain to celebrate the last hours of the old year, or the trip back down, wrapped up tight in a blanket with Mum’s, Dad’s or a neighbour’s warm arm around her shoulders.

But on New Year’s Eve the year Anna turned ten, no snow had fallen either on the mountain plateau or on the lowlands. Jack Frost had long held the countryside in his icy grip but, apart from the odd small drift, the mountains were untouched by snow. Even the high mountain terrain lay bare beneath the open sky, stripped of its winter cloak.

Adults muttered about ‘global warming’ and ‘climate change’, and Anna made a note of these new terms. For the first time in her life she had a sense that the world was in disarray.

But to the mountains they had to go, whatever the conditions, even though the only possible way to get there would be by tractor. They would also have to go during the day – without snow on the plateau, it would be too dark to see your hand in front of your face at night. Even torches would be of little use, and tying them to the tractors and trailers would look silly.

So it was that five tractors and trailers wound their way slowly through the birch trees carrying delicious food and drink. Snow or no snow, they had to raise a glass to the New Year and perhaps organise some games on the frozen meadows.

The absence of snow had not been the only talking point that Christmas. Over the holidays, reindeer had been spotted down by the farms, and people joked that Father Christmas might have left behind a couple on his rooftop travels.

Anna had sensed that there was something scary, something alarming about this. Reindeer had never strayed down to the villages before. Anna had seen pictures in the newspaper of farmers trying to feed a poor, frightened creature: Wild Reindeer in Mountain Villages the caption had read.

The procession of tractors set off, and Anna was in the first trailer with a few of the other children. The higher they climbed, the more the frozen landscape looked like glass. It must have rained before the frosts came, trapping water underneath.

They caught sight of an animal carcass on the roadside, and all the tractors stopped. It was a reindeer, frozen stiff, and one of the men explained that it had starved to death.

Anna didn’t quite understand. But later, when they were up in the mountains, she saw that the whole area was frozen over. Every last pebble and plant was trapped below the sheet of ice.

They passed Lake Brea. Here the five tractors stopped again and the drivers switched off their engines. They were told the ice was safe, and everyone rushed out on to the lake, adults and children alike. The ice was transparent, and shouts of excitement rang out as they realised they could see trout swimming beneath their feet.

Out came balls, hockey sticks and toboggans. But Anna walked on her own along the shore, studying the frozen heath. Under a thin membrane of ice she saw moss and lichen, crowberries and black bearberries with crimson leaves. It was as though she had moved into a more precious, a more refined, world. Soon, though, she spotted a dead mouse … and another. Under a dwarf birch she found a dead lemming. By now Anna understood, and she no longer felt as though she was on an adventure. She had known that mice and lemmings survived winter in the mountains by hiding between bushes and scrub, under soft blankets of snow. But if there were no blankets of snow, the mice and lemmings would not survive.

Now Anna was in no doubt why the reindeer had strayed down to the lowlands. And it had nothing to do with Father Christmas.

Anna was sitting at home with her parents in their old timber house. It had been dark for hours, and her dad had lit candles on the mantelpiece and windowsill. It was 10 December, and there were only two nights left before she turned sixteen.

Her mum and dad were huddled on the sofa. They were watching a film about the Pacific Ocean, an adventure story about naval battles. Or was it a documentary about one of those legendary eighteenth-century sea captains? Anna wasn’t sure; she wasn’t really following.

She sat at the dining-room table casting the odd glance at the Pacific as it flickered across the television screen. She was holding a large pair of scissors and was cutting articles out of old newspapers.

In August, Anna had started upper secondary and, after just a few days at the new school, she got to know Jonas, who was in the class above her. They quickly became good friends and for a few days they pretended to be a couple, as a sort of game, but then they realised that was exactly what they were.

Anna sat hunched over her cuttings with a big mug of tea. She smiled at how suddenly life could change.

But she had been prepared for changes – after all, she was turning sixteen. Today, at last, she had been given her Aunt Sunniva’s old ring. She had known for a long time that she would inherit it on her birthday. But she had been given it today because her mum was going to a conference early the next morning. They had a formal dinner – her mum had been to the bakery and brought back a marzipan cake with a red rose on top – and after the meal, the ruby was unpacked from an old jewellery box and presented to Anna. She wore it for the rest of the evening and, while she was cutting up the newspapers, she could not keep her eyes off the ring.

It was more than a hundred years old – some said several hundred years. And there were so many exciting stories about the jewel.

She had also been given the smartphone she had asked for. She could now get online with just one touch of the screen – but that was nothing compared to how wonderful her ring was.

But the ring wasn’t the strangest thing that had happened to Anna that year. The strangest had to be her trip to Oslo in October.

Ever since she was small, Anna had been told she had a lively imagination. If she was asked what she was thinking, she would reel off endless stories, and no one had thought this was anything other than a good thing. But that spring, Anna had begun to believe some of the stories. She had a feeling that they were being sent to her, perhaps from another time, or even another reality.

In the end, Anna’s parents persuaded her to have a chat with a psychologist. After several sessions, the psychologist said she would like Anna to be examined by a psychiatrist in Oslo. Anna didn’t mind this. She had nothing to be ashamed of, she thought; in fact it made her feel special.

But she had set one condition: that her parents couldn’t come. Jonas offered to go with her. Her mum and dad insisted that one of them had to accompany her. They reached a compromise: she was allowed to take Jonas, but Mum would go too, if she promised to sit in another train carriage.

So the three of them turned up at the Rikshospital where Anna had her appointment with the psychiatrist. But neither her mum nor Jonas was allowed to go in with her, at least not at first, and Anna could see that this was a terrible blow to her mother. She had wanted so much to be involved. But for now she had to sit and wait with Jonas.

Anna liked Dr Benjamin from the moment she saw him. He was in his fifties and had long, greying hair tied into a ponytail. In one ear he had a tiny violet star, and in the breast pocket of his black jacket he had a red felt pen. There was a playful glint in his eyes and he watched her intently.

She could still remember the first thing he said after they had shaken hands and he had closed the door behind him. He told her that Lady Luck was smiling on them because his next appointment h. . .