Bücher von Maggie Brooke

When Stella Stardust, a ten-year-old girl from northern New South Wales in 1875, was born the mysterious Aboriginal midwife who delivered her placed a strange-smelling amulet around her neck, for a 'special child'. Fortune, the oldest elephant in captivity in the Southern Hemisphere, has been with The Amazing Travelling Stardust Circus for most of his life but wants to return to Africa so he can die there. The night they meet he and Stella save the townspeople from a burning Big Top and Stella discovers that she can talk to animals at night. She hears Fortune's plea and the adventure begins. Girl and elephant stowaway on a three-masted schooner. They encounter hunger, thirst, pirates, slavers and wild animals as they trek across wild seas and into deepest Africa. They find Fortune's family and then they set off once again. Fortune goes to the elephant's graveyard to die, leaving Stella alone in the middle of Africa, to find her own way home to her own family.

The year is 1999 and the whole world is going a little bit crazy. As she treads the delicate balance between insanity and faith, Iris Anders finds an unlikely ally in Fr Francis Carlos-Carlos, a young Filipino missionary. Iris, a librarian, finds herself the unwitting recipient of what appear to be the wounds of Christ - the Stigmata. Her husband suspects self-harming; her family says she is having another one of her 'episodes'; her parish priest just wants her gone from his church. Fr Frank, who has recently come from a country where faith is lived, not just observed, has dealt with this sort of thing before but he came to Australia to escape such Penitentes. As Iris struggles to find meaning in her wounds and heretical dreams, the world hears of this 'miracle worker' and beats a path to her door. Saint or fake? Healer or fraud? Even Iris doesn't know.

The sequel to ''Stella and the Elephant''. Stranded in the middle of Africa, in the year 1875, Stella Stardust has parted from her friend, Fortune the elephant, so that he can follow his destiny to the Elephant''s Graveyard. Now she must find her way, alone, back home to her family in Australia. On this journey she encounters wild animals, bogs, heat, storms and magic as she is hunted by a slave trader who wants to sell her for gold. Stella can talk to animals (at night) and encounters help in unexpected places but can she find her way home?