ARCHIPELAGO BOOKS

A psychedelic adventure story of friendship, peril, gender questions, and foraging in two floating villages, perfect for 5-8 year olds — the latest fantasy world from beloved writer and illustrator Claude Ponti. In two floating villages on the river Longo live a pair of boat-faring communities, sailing where their whim or the current takes them. The Oolongs are known for the delicious roots, fruits, and flowers they gather; the Kukichas pick healiherbs, and prepare powerful potions that help them feel their best. Both communities foster an atmosphere of openness and play in all aspects of life, including where gender is concerned. For Lu Cha (an Oolong boy) and Ali Roo (a Kukicha girl), it's only natural that gender can be chosen, tried out, and reconsidered as each child sees fit. All is well in this idyllic world until suddenly, from far beyond the shiverbanks and the boobam brambles, a mysterious beast comes to prowl. Claude Ponti develops parallel utopian worlds where two communities, governed by values of kindness, openness, inventiveness, and the pursuit of beauty, end up realizing they need each other. In Claude Ponti’s wonderfully detailed illustrations and sparkling wordplay, skillfully translated by Margot Kerlidou and Alyson Waters, young readers will find a faraway world of pleasure, fright, and friendship.

The stories in Igifu summon phantom memories of Rwanda and radiate with the fierce ache of a survivor. From the National Book Award finalist who Zadie Smith says, rescues a million souls from the collective noun genocide. Scholastique Mukasonga's autobiographical stories rend a glorious Rwanda from the obliterating force of recent history, conjuring the noble cows of her home or the dew-swollen grass they graze on. In the title story, five-year-old Colomba tells of a merciless overlord, hunger or igifu, gnawing away at her belly. She searches for sap at the bud of a flower, scraps of sweet potato at the foot of her parent's bed, or a few grains of sorghum in the floor sweepings. Igifu becomes a dizzying hole in her stomach, a plunging abyss into which she falls. In a desperate act of preservation, Colomba's mother gathers enough sorghum to whip up a nourishing porridge, bringing Colomba back to life. This elixir courses through each story, a balm to soothe the pains of those so ferociously fighting for survival. Her writing eclipses the great gaps of time and memory; in one scene she is a child sitting squat with a jug of sweet, frothy milk and in another she is an exiled teacher, writing down lists of her dead. As in all her work, Scholastique sits up with them, her witty and beaming beloved.

A metaphysical detective story about love and existence from the Italian master, Antonio Tabucchi. When Tadeus sets out to find Isabel, his former love, he soon finds himself on a metaphysical journey across the world, one that calls into question the meaning of time and existence and the power of words. Isabel disappeared many years ago. Tadeus Slowacki, a Polish writer, her former friend and lover, has come back to Lisbon to learn of her whereabouts. Rumors abound: Isabel died in prison under Salazar's regime, or perhaps wasn't arrested at all. As Tadeus interviews one old acquaintance of hers after the next, a chameleon-like portrait of a young, ideological woman emerges, ultimately bringing Tadeus on a metaphysical journey across the continent. Constructed in the form of a mandala, For Isabel is the spiraling search for an enigma, an investigation into time and existence, the power of words, and the limits of the senses. In this posthumous work Tabucchi creates an ingenious narration, tracing circles around a lost woman and the ultimate inaccessible truth.