The Viewer
Description
Inside, the box was crammed with treasures, each more intriguing than the last ... his eyes glistened with delight at the promise these wonders held ...
An intricate, fantastical tale for young teens, written by Gary Crew, four-time winner of the CBC Book of the Year Award, and illustrated by Shaun Tan, winner of the Kate Greenaway Medal 2020.
Young Tristan, a curious boy who rescues all sorts of objects from the rubbish dump, finds an old Viewmaster in its elaborate box, complete with a set of disks.He finds that these represent the ages of humankind, seen as a cyclical structure in which patterns of growth and decay are repeated.
Tristan becomes more and more drawn in to the world of the disks, and eventually disappears.
The book is full of metaphors and symbols of seeing and watching, circularity and never-endingness, in a complex, fantastical tale, which was Shaun Tan's first picture book.
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GARY CREW is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland. He has won the Children's Book Council of Australia's Book of the Year four times and his readers have come to expect shadowy, surprising, incredible stories that must be read, and read again.
STEVEN WOOLMAN (1969-2004) completed a degree in Design and Illustration at the University of South Australia in 1990 and was always fascinated by bizarre fantasy. For the illustrations in The Watertower, his fifth published book, he used a combination of acrylic paint and chalk and pencil on black paper.