I'm surrounded by children's books. This year, most on grief and loss. Here's a list for anyone who needs it. A constant companion is Oliver Jeffers' The Heart and the Bottle. 'In truth, nothing was the same. She forgot about the stars… and stopped taking notice of the sea.'
In his Sad Book, Michael Rosen writes about his sadness, how it comes and finds us and how it’s something we all carry even if we don’t show it.
Death said quietly, ‘Cry, Heart, but never break. Let your tears of grief and sadness help begin new life.’ Glenn Ringtved and Charlotte Pardi on the one certainty of life, Death, takes a physical form
‘That’s what it will be like when I’ dead, Duck thought. The pond alone, without me.’ Wolf Erlbruch’s Duck, Death and the Tulip is about that inevitable, unlikely friendship.
The Rabbit Listened by Cori Doerrfeld is a book that explains a lot. Reactions, the people you are surrounded or enveloped by, the boiling emotions, and how sometimes what you need to be for that friend, is this rabbit.
The left-behind objects that surround us. Adithi Rao and Krishna Bala Shenoi store those memories in Chuchu Manthu's Jar of Toffees. A book I edited without realising how significant and important it was, with many details of light and dark tucked inside it.
For a while, I couldn't read at all. But then I realised that books are what I have. And that's what Somak Ghosal and Proiti Roy's Piku's Little World allows retreat into, that one solid world, the world of books.
Bijal Vachharajani
