By Shaun Tan
A man leaves his family and his threatened city for a country he can't read, drawn in 128 pages with not one single word in them.
A man packs a suitcase, says goodbye to his wife and daughter, and leaves the city they live in, because something is wrong there. Enormous dark shapes like dragon tails hang over the rooftops. He sails a long way, is processed through a huge immigration hall with other new arrivals, and steps out into a country where he cannot read a sign, order food, or ask directions. Nothing works the way it did at home. The animals are unfamiliar, the machines make no sense, the alphabet is invented. He finds work, he gets it wrong, he tries again. Other immigrants tell him how they came to be here too. He saves, and in the end his wife and daughter step off a boat and into the same strange city, and his daughter is the one giving directions to a newcomer. There is not a word of text anywhere in the book. It's all sepia pictures, laid out like a very old photo album.
The wordlessness is the whole argument. Tan puts a child in the exact position of the man in the book, surrounded by writing they cannot read, working out what's going on from faces and pictures alone. A student who struggles with a paragraph can do this book completely, and a student who reads three grades up will still be arguing about page four. That's rare, and it's why it earns its place in a mixed-level room. It also refuses to name a country, a year, or a language, so nobody can file it under somebody else's history. The details are all invented, and the feeling of arriving somewhere that doesn't explain itself to you is exact.