In 1895, a young Irish woman arrived in southern India and never left.

For fifty-five years - without a single furlough, without ever returning home - Amy Carmichael lived among the people of Dohnavur, in the shadow of the Western Ghats. What she found there changed the entire direction of her life: children given away by desperate mothers, sold by overwhelmed guardians, dedicated to temple service before they were old enough to understand what that meant. Children the world had decided did not matter.

Amy decided otherwise.

Lotus Buds is her account of those children - small, real, entirely themselves. There is Bala, the quiet child who watched the sunset and said she had looked into Heaven. There is Chellalu, the irrepressible scamp who reproduced the preacher's sermon in the middle of the church aisle. There is little Tara, who wept with joy when Amy came home, and Evu, who felt nothing of the kind and said so. There is old D