This is the captivating account of a seduction. A city woman is unaccountably smitten by the desire to have her own piece of bush, to the point where she resigns her job as professor of public health at the Christchurch School of Medicine and takes on an isolated Banks Peninsula property. Cloud Farm is 165 acres of gorse-ridden, cloud-shrouded hillside 2,000 feet above sea level. The house hasn’t been lived in for 60 years and the rats have been having a ball. Jane Chetwynd’s steady progress in the face of obstacles is impressive. She leaves her cosmopolitan life (and steady income) and takes on the role of landowner. First job: to make the house habitable – a job which requires lateral thinking for a woman with little practical bent. The author’s interest in bush regeneration sees her encouraging the growth of native trees and grappling with the gorse problem which threatens not only her property fut her finances as well. Told in vibrant prose spiked with humor and affectionate portraits of fellow players, Cloud Farm will appeal to anyone who has ever nursed a dream where the odds seem impossible.