Faraway Island Series 1. A Faraway Island (Faraway Island #1) 2. The Lily Pond (Faraway Island #2) 3. Havets djup (En ö i havet, #3) 4. Öppet hav (En ö i havet, #4) About the author Annika Thor grew up in a Jewish family in Gothenburg, Sweden, in the 1950s and 60s. She started work as a librarian and then went on to work as a film and television critic, and finally dedicated herself to writing books, plays, and screenplays for young people. She is one of Sweden’s best known authors for young people. Her books have been translated into many languages and have won many prizes. A Faraway Island (Faraway Island #1) by Annika Thor Translator by Linda Schenck Torn from their homeland, two Jewish sisters find refuge in Sweden. It's the summer of 1939. Two Jewish sisters from Vienna—12-year-old Stephie Steiner and 8-year-old Nellie—are sent to Sweden to escape the Nazis. They expect to stay there six months, until their parents can flee to Amsterdam; then all four will go to America. But as the world war intensifies, the girls remain, each with her own host family, on a rugged island off the western coast of Sweden. Nellie quickly settles in to her new surroundings. She’s happy with her foster family and soon favors the Swedish language over her native German. Not so for Stephie, who finds it hard to adapt; she feels stranded at the end of the world, with a foster mother who’s as cold and unforgiving as the island itself. Her main worry, though, is her parents—and whether she will ever see them again.
The Lily Pond (Faraway Island #2) by Annika Thor Translator by Linda Schenck A Mildred L. Batchelder Honor Book and an ALA-ALSC Notable Children’s Book, The Lily Pond continues the story of two Jewish sisters who left Austria during WWII/Holocaust and found refuge in Sweden. A year after Stephie Steiner and her younger sister, Nellie, left Nazi-occupied Vienna, Stephie has finally adapted to life on the rugged Swedish island where she now lives. But more change awaits Stephie: her foster parents have allowed her to enroll in school on the mainland, in Goteberg. Stephie is eager to go. Not only will she be pursuing her studies, she'll be living in a cultured city again—under the same roof as Sven, the son of the lodgers who rented her foster parents' cottage for the summer. Five years her senior, Sven dazzles Stephie with his charm, his talk of equality, and his anti-Hitler sentiments. Stephie can't help herself—she's falling in love. As she navigates a sea of new emotions, she also grapples with what it means to be beholden to others, with her constant worry about what her parents are enduring back in Vienna, and with the menacing spread of Nazi ideology, even in Sweden. In these troubled times, her true friends, Stephie discovers, are the ones she least expected.
