10 that
feels completely made-up and yet is based on a reality the author knows well. With its religion and superstitions, its extraordinary love stories and local political machinations, the more far- fetched it becomes, the more likely it is to be based on truth. It’s the story of a young man who arrives – barefoot and broken – in a little village, and camps out in the hollow head of an unfinished statue of Saint Anthony, where he finds he can hear the local women’s prayers…
Waffle Hearts Maria Parr, trans Guy Puzey, Walker Books, 978-1406347906, £5.99 pbk
Meanwhile Waffle Hearts, by Maria Parr (in a fine English translation by Guy Puzey) may be set in a small town in Scandinavia, but it feels like it might be anywhere. Yes, the setting is vivid and appealing and precise, but the story is about friendship and multi-generational family and community, told with great humour and warmth, reminding us what we have in common, not what keeps us apart.
The Adventures of Shola Bernardo Atxaga, trans Margaret Jull Costa, Pushkin Press, 978-1782690092, £14.99 hbk Waffle Hearts was a strong contender for this year’s Marsh Award, which finally went to my next choice, The Adventures of Shola, (by Basque writer Bernardo Atxaga, translated by Margaret Jull Costa). This is in no way a book in which setting is important, and yet I wanted to choose it as a way of celebrating the huge, huge wealth of books being written in other places which we English-readers so rarely get to see. This one – a delightful, quirky collection of stories about an extremely characterful little dog – is a particular favourite. I’m so glad it’s reached us at last! This is thanks to Pushkin Press, who of all the children’s publishers in the UK today commission with the widest horizons. Their catalogue – uniquely – includes brilliant books translated from all over the world.
When You Reach Me Rebecca Stead, Andersen Press, 978-1849392129, £6.99 I seem to have nothing at all from North America. Hmm. I considered the latest excellent novel by Kenneth Oppel, The Boundless, mostly set on a train making its way across Canada, coast to coast – apart from everything else, it’s amazing on the SCALE of the place. (It’s all HUGE.)
But I’ll go for something quite different instead, I think, a mystery novel set on the Upper West Side, When You Reach Me. New York’s a city I know well, and through the story of sixth-grader Miranda, author Rebecca Stead recreates late-1970s life in one particular neighborhood (sic) with the subtlest detail. (I suspect it’ll feel familiar even to someone who’s never been, which is an amazing trick, too.)
The Arrival Shaun Tan, Hodder Children’s Books, 978-0734415868, £10.99 pbk A lot of the books that, to me, are most effective at introducing new places are those using characters for whom the places are new, too – stories of migration and refugees, for example. Many are stories of people recently arrived in the UK, making us read about our own places as the ‘other’, seen through the sharp-focus eyes of someone discovering them for the first time. Think of Sarah Crossan’s The Weight of Water or Sarah Garland’s Azzi in Between, both stories about ‘here’ but from the perspective of someone for whom this is ‘elsewhere’. Perhaps the best migration story I know is Shaun Tan’s The Arrival, a wordless graphic novel set in an imagined place, to which a father travels, separated from his family, and we share his experience. The pictures are a beautiful cinematic sepia, and the story of the man’s attempts to negotiate this
strange new place Alice’s Adventures
in Wonderland Lewis Carroll, illus Sir John Tenniel, 978-1447275992, £30.00 hbk
Talking of strange, imagined places – and places that are both ‘here’ and ‘elsewhere’ at once… We have a big anniversary this year. It’s not often that one can truly say a single book changed literature, but one of those few times was a hundred and fifty years ago this very summer. My tenth choice? Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Daniel Hahn is an award-winning writer, editor and translator and national programme director of the British Centre for Literary Translation. He is the editor of the New Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature.
Books for Keeps No.213 July 2015 5 is told with
extraordinary subtlety and compassion. One of my favourite books ever, this one.
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