Alexi is an elderly woman, lying in a hospital bed on Christmas Eve, 2085, nearing the end of her life. As her pain medication causes her to drift, she thinks back to the true love she has never forgotten, even though those memories are more than seventy years old. In 2014, Alexi is eighteen, and although she doesnt know it, this Christmas will bring magic. She discovers she is able to walk through her mirror into another world, where she travels to a placed called Azure City and meets a young man named Ethan. She learns that this is, in fact, a gateway to paradise--a place for people to encounter their soul mates before moving on to heaven. Alexi spends seven days with Ethan--visiting a water park, flying in a hot air balloon, riding a dog sled pulled by rabbits, and so much more. She also finds that living a good life on earth will bring her soul back to paradise after death--to spend eternity with her soul mate. In this fantasy novel, a young woman visits a spiritual realm at the age of eighteen and discovers that she has a soul mate waiting for her in heaven.

Tommy Woodcock spent a long lifetime with horses, but is best remembered, and loved, as the young man who strapped and looked after Australia's legendary racehorse, Phar Lap. The 1930 Melbourne Cup winner and the people's champion of the Great Depression died mysteriously - cradled by Woodcock - in the US after winning against the odds in Agua Caliente, Mexico, at his only start overseas. The horseman called Phar Lap "Bobby", and knew him best. And Woodcock is fondly known, too, as the old man, who almost 50 years on, trained the gallant Reckless, second in the 1977 Melbourne Cup and winner of the other major "two-mile" races on the Australian turf calendar at the time, the Sydney, Adelaide and Brisbane Cups. Reckless is the same horse Woodcock let children ride at the track on race day, and was pictured with bunked down in the straw, on the front page of The Age newspaper. Woodcock's life story and his great and heart-breaking moments with Phar Lap and Reckless are told in his own down-to- earth words by a master storyteller, Jan Wositzky, in this updated and revised edition, with a new introduction.

This book is about a poor boy who makes it through sport to the highest levels of academia.