Camille Perrochet

With profundity and much mischief, the author constructs a set of ideas only to throw them into question immediately: A man builds a house for himself not with bricks and cement but with hardness and stickiness. And he doesn’t want a wife – all he wants is something alive, like a dog or a cat.Zurich-based artist Nadine Spengler has illustrated Robert Lax’s short poem in a deliberately simple style. Text and images encourage young readers to follow the spare language of the story and invite them to read aloud. The sense of calm this creates comes as much from the content of the book as the simplicity of the language.