The Farthest-Away Mountain

The Farthest-Away Mountain is a children's fantasy novel by the British writer Lynne Reid Banks, first published in 1976. It follows a girl from a mountain valley who leaves home to keep a promise she made as a child, and the mountain she means to climb turns out to have a will of its own.

Dakin grew up in a village in a valley, and when she was small she was asked what she wanted from her life. She said she would go to the Farthest-Away Mountain, speak with a gargoyle and marry a prince, and her family has teased her about it ever since.

Two days before her fifteenth birthday she wakes early, having heard someone call to her in a dream, and sees the mountain nod from across the valley. The Mountain itself is alive and calls good people to live on its slopes, which for many years they did in peace. More than two centuries earlier a teacher from Dakin's own village answered that call and brought with him the wicked son of a magician, who mastered the place, turned his teacher into a frog and drove its people off. Dakin sets out with three goals to keep and a mountain that is already aware of her.