In Max's Dream William Mayne has returned to the Corn-wall of A Year and a Day, to the 1890's when, in a small community tightly organised, thirteen-year-old Katie, servant in training to Mrs. Veary, cherishes an unspoken love for Max, the boy who lies in the room above, dominating the household with his precocious speech and his physical helplessness. The story is distanced from the reader not only in date but also in the manner of its telling, for Katie, an old woman waiting for death, is looking back at this critical year in her life, capturing, as the old can, the very ebb and flow of her feelings and the precise detail of cottage kitchen or bedroom, carrier's cart or seaside ferry. The mystery of Max—who he is, what his condition is, when he was orphaned—is unravelled partly as Katie and her peers talk to...