Based on the Oscar award-winning short film, this book asks important questions: What does it mean to see things differently? What is important to notice?
Shaun Tan is the author and illustrator of The Lost Thing, The Red Tree and The Arrival, all of which have won numerous international awards. The Lost Thing animation recently won an Oscar for the best animated short film. The Arrival won Shaun the Bologna Ragazzi Prize and Picture Book of the Year from CBCA 2007 amongst others. Shaun's books have been widely translated. Previous books Shaun has illustrated include The Rabbits by John Marsden (CBCA Picture Book of the Year) and with Gary Crew, Memorial (A CBCA Honour Book) and The Viewer (winner of the Crichton Award for illustration). In 2001 Shaun received the 'World Fantasy Best Artist Award' for his body of work. Shaun is the winner of the 2011 Astrid Lindgren prize, the world's richest children's literature award. The award described Shaun as 'a masterly visually storyteller'.
This book is a quest for the "Lost Thing" to find a place where it belongs. But perhaps even more, it is also a quest for meaning on the part of the reader. guardian.co.uk A warm, funny read for kids, and an unexpectedly moving one for adults. Cambridge First
Tan's affecting and sophisticated picture books, including The Red Tree, pack an emotional and visual wallop, but saturate readers with ennui. This melancholy story, despite pale whimsy, cannot muster much hope for those "lost things" with uncertain raisons d'?tre. The narrator is a stoop-shouldered, Dilbert-like nerd who finds the Lost Thing while collecting those quintessential cast-offs-bottle caps-on an industrial beach. Tan pictures the Lost Thing as a garbage-truck-size red vessel with crablike gray claws and tentacles, equal parts organism, machine and teakettle. Surely it is too weird to pass unnoticed, yet everyone ignores it. The storyteller and thing interact like a boy and dog, playing fetch, making a sandcastle (or sand-factory, really). After feeding the thing in his gloomy backyard shed, the hero tries to deliver it to the windowless Federal Department of Odds & Ends. Yet he cannot bear to leave it there: "This is a place for forgetting," a machine/man hybrid janitor portends. Only through effort does he find an alternative suggested by the janitor, "a dark little gap off some anonymous little street," which opens into a Dal!-esque habitation of other frolicking, forgotten things. Tan's intricate multimedia paintings reference Hopper's empty windows and the alienated cityscapes of Lang's Metropolis. This weighty book is best suited to mature children or older comics/science-fiction readers, who will goggle at the marvelous illustrations. Ages 7-up. (Feb.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
This book is a quest for the "Lost Thing" to find a place where it belongs. But perhaps even more, it is also a quest for meaning on the part of the reader. guardian.co.uk A warm, funny read for kids, and an unexpectedly moving one for adults. Cambridge First
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