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Gary Crew, Author
Shaun Tan, Illustrator
Imprint: Hodder Children's Books
Publication date: January 5, 2012
Category: Picture books
ISBN: 9780734411891
Inside, the box was crammed with treasures, each more intriguing than the last … his eyes glistened with delight at the promise these wonders held …
An intricate, fantastical tale for young teens, written by Gary Crew, four-time winner of the CBC Book of the Year Award, and illustrated by Shaun Tan, winner of the Kate Greenaway Medal 2020.
Young Tristan, a curious boy who rescues all sorts of objects from the rubbish dump, finds an old Viewmaster in its elaborate box, complete with a set of disks.He finds that these represent the ages of humankind, seen as a cyclical structure in which patterns of growth and decay are repeated.
Tristan becomes more and more drawn in to the world of the disks, and eventually disappears.
The book is full of metaphors and symbols of seeing and watching, circularity and never-endingness, in a complex, fantastical tale, which was Shaun Tan’s first picture book.
GARY CREW is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland. He has won the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s Book of the Year four times and his readers have come to expect shadowy, surprising, incredible stories that must be read, and read again.
STEVEN WOOLMAN (1969-2004) completed a degree in Design and Illustration at the University of South Australia in 1990 and was always fascinated by bizarre fantasy. For the illustrations in The Watertower, his fifth published book, he used a combination of acrylic paint and chalk and pencil on black paper.
Shaun Tan grew up in Perth and graduated from the University of Western Australia with joint honours in Fine Arts and English Literature. He began drawing and painting images for science fiction and horror stories in small-press magazines as a teenager, and has since become best known for illustrated books that deal with social, political and historical subjects through surreal, dream-like imagery. His works include The Red Tree, The Lost Thing, Rules of Summer and the acclaimed wordless novel The Arrival. All have been widely translated throughout Europe, Asia and South America, and are enjoyed by readers of all ages.
Shaun has also worked as a theatre designer and a concept artist for the films Horton Hears a Who and Pixar’s WALL-E and in 2011, he shared an Academy Award for his work on the animated short film based on his book, The Lost Thing. In that same year, he won the Dromkeen Medal for services to children’s literature and the Astrid Lindgren prize, the world’s richest children’s literature award.
For more information visit shauntan.net