The Elephant in the Room

Sila's mum has been gone for nearly a year, stuck in Turkey waiting for the paperwork that will let her come home. Sila has stopped talking much, even to her friends. Then a trip with her dad to fix a truck takes her behind an enormous stone wall, where a kindly old man has just won the lottery and has no idea what to do with it. What he needs, it turns out, is help rescuing a circus elephant named Veda. Looking after a creature that big (and that sad, and that far from home) slowly starts to mend something in Sila too. A gentle, funny, big-hearted story from the author of Counting by 7s.