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

Format: Paperback
Pages: 320
Imprint: Allen & Unwin Children’s Books
Publication date: 03/10/2023
Illustrator: Tan, Shaun