It's been 20 years since Oliver Jeffers gifted us his debut picture book How To Catch a Star. And for 20 years he's been wow-ing us with book after beautiful book. To celebrate this 20th anniversary Jeffers delivers another glittering Star Book featuring his cast of cherished characters that have featured in a series of books that include Lost and Found, The Way Back Home and Up and Down.
If you haven't met this delightful duo yet, you really must. Once there was a boy who would often play hide-and-seek with his friends the star and Penguin. When they lose the star, they set out to find him with their pal the Martian. This mission to the North Pole is a touching tale of friendship for picture book lovers everywhere.
Celebrate twenty years of The Boy in this highly anticipated new adventure from the internationally bestselling picture book creator of Lost and Found Oliver Jeffers!
Once there was a boy who would often play hide-and-seek with his friends the star and the penguin. The star was always easy to find, but one day it went missing. So, the boy radioed the Martian for help and soon found himself on an exciting spaceship rescue mission to the North Pole! But there, he discovered that he wasn't the only one who had always dreamed of having a star as a friend…
The out-of-this-world, long-awaited sequel to the much-loved Boy stories, loved all around the world - now introducing a brand-new character!
Oliver Jeffers has won numerous awards and delighted millions of kids and parents alike with his beautifully hand illustrated stories.
Jeffers's picture books are wonderfully accessible. They explore themes of friendship, loneliness, independence and imagination. He has written and illustrated, or "made", as he prefers to put it, five hugely successful picture books. The first three - the "boy books" - feature a small boy who sets off on a series of daunting quests. How to Catch a Star (2004), the first of them, was inspired by a Brer Rabbit story he read as a child. In Lost and Found (2005) the boy heroically rows to the south pole for the sake of an unhappy penguin, and in The Way Back Home (2007) he rescues a young Martian whose spaceship has crashed on the moon.
The Heart and the Bottle is wholly compelling for the importance of its message and the brilliance of how that is conveyed in words and pictures. This is a book to return to time and time again says Julia Eccleshare, Lovereading4kids’ editorial expert.
Jeffers was born in Australia in 1977 and brought up in Belfast. He studied visual communication at the University of Ulster, and graduated in 2001. Jeffers became passionate about making picture books when he began to understand the subtle relationship between words and pictures – ‘that was what excited me. Until I got really involved, I hadn't realised how just a few words can totally change the meaning of a picture.’ Now living in New York, he works as a painter, designer, printmaker and installation artist, but remains very busy making picture books.
Did you know?
Oliver loves plastic food, suitcase handles and Elvis, and has developed a bizarre habit of endlessly writing lists he never reads. He remains hell bent on travelling all over the world.
You can see Oliver talking about his artwork in this video:
We have a super set of Oliver Jeffers activity pages to download :
