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Beautiful hymns to nature and the modern metropolis are among this month’s highlights
Many of Oliver Jeffers’s books have a folk tale flavour, their gentle messages smuggled in via offbeat characters with extraordinary skills or habits (think of The Incredible Book Eating Boy or the girl who hides her heart away in The Heart and the Bottle). Yet The Fate of Fausto (Harper Collins), “a painted fable”, as Jeffers describes it, feels like a fantastically fresh departure.
Fausto is a pompous, pinstripe-suited man with a twirly moustache and a desire to own the natural world. “Tree, you are mine,” he shouts before moving on to the lake as the tree bows obediently. More spare in text and imagery than its predecessors, it’s a tale full of suggestion with expanses of white page wittily used as pregnant pauses and punctuation. Continue reading...