Best illustrated books all over the world
Oleksandr Shatokhin’s Yellow Butterfly is a wordless picture book from Ukraine. No text, just images — black lines, watercolor, and a single butterfly in yellow. The child walks through ruins and barbed wire, and the butterfly leads her toward light. It’s simple but sharp: the butterfly is hope, the color […]
Kintsugi is a Japanese art form of repairing broken pottery by covering the chipped area with urushi lacquer, with gold, silver, or platinum added. This tradition carries a special philosophy: the breakage is part of the life and history of the object, and should not be hidden. Issa Watanabe’s Kintsugi, […]
Sometimes it’s so exciting to spy on your neighbors, looking out the window! In other people’s apartments, incredible things often happen. In Finestre, the main character loves to watch the residents of other apartments. Each has its own story, which, through her rich imagination, turns into a mini-movie: some are […]
A tiny masked figure quietly wanders across the rooftops of a large city. He’s a ninja, but not a dangerous one; his mission is not revenge or battle, but love. The little ninja has fallen in love with the Moon and is now trying with all his might to reach […]
David Wiesner is known for his surreal, wordless picture books. One of his most celebrated works is “Tuesday”. On a Tuesday evening, around eight o’clock, a group of frogs suddenly takes off from their swamp and soar over the town, flying into houses and scaring people around — only to […]
In Alessandro Sanna’s nearly wordless book, the reader follows the four seasons along the Po River, witnessing the flow of time and the lives of characters who become part of the current. Soft watercolor transitions capture the first rays of dawn, twilight in the reeds, and storm-darkened skies. The horizontal […]
Original title: Река Elena Safonova presents the river as a symbol of human progress in her 1930 picture book. Its course carries the reader from villages and wooden bridges to steamships, railways, power stations, and apartment blocks, and finally flows into the open sea. Here, the river becomes a force […]
This wordless picture book by Dutch artist Friso Henstra is about a pair of mice determined to build a cute little house out of a red cabbage. After much effort, the house is finally ready — but unexpectedly it attracts someone else and suddenly becomes the dinner of a cunning […]