Tales of Light and Dark: A Shaun Tan Collection

Who is that exchange student living in our cupboard?
Whatever happened to all those bears with lawyers?
Why do dogs bark in the middle of the night?



Collected together for the first time, forty illustrated tales of urban and suburban wonder, fear, humour and hope by the acclaimed creator of The Arrival, The Lost Thing and The Singing Bones.


Tales from Outer Suburbia paints a landscape of complex beauty and disquiet, where the unspoken feelings of ordinary people take physical form as strange animals, machines and the most unlikely of house guests. Winner of the CBCA Book of the Year Award for Older Readers.


Tales from the Inner City examines our troubled relationship with fellow animals, and the deep sense of love, crisis and longing that tolls beneath the traffic of our urban dreams. Winner of the Kate Greenaway Medal.


'Tan's work overflows with human warmth and childlike wonder. But it also makes a perfect adult bedtime story, a little something to shake loose your imagination from the moors of reality right before your own dreams kick in.' - The New York Times


'Stories that will seep into your dreams . . . A profound, stunning work of art.'Books+Publishing

Shaun Tan grew up in Perth, Western Australia, and currently works as an artist, writer and film-maker in Melbourne. He began creating images for science fiction 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 dream-like imagery. The Rabbits, The Red Tree, The Lost Thing, Tales from Outer Suburbia, The Arrival, Rules of Summer, The Singing Bones, Tales from the Inner City and Creature have been enjoyed by readers of all ages, locally and internationally. Shaun has also worked as a theatre designer, a concept artist for Pixar and Blue Sky Studios, and won an Academy Award for the short film adaptation of The Lost Thing. In 2011 he received the prestigious Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award in Sweden, in recognition of his services to literature for young people and in 2020 he won the Kate Greenaway Medal for illustration.

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