The Arrival

by Shaun Tan

An immigrant's journey. No words. Every feeling.

For you if

your child needs to understand what it feels like to arrive somewhere completely new without the words for anything — before they ever need those words themselves

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$22 MSRP
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A man leaves his family and travels to a strange new country — a place with an impossible skyline, bizarre creatures, an unfamiliar language, and customs he cannot decode. The entire story is told without words, in sepia-toned panels that look like old photographs from a family album. Tan, the son of a Chinese Malaysian immigrant, uses an invented world that looks like no specific country to tell a story that belongs to every immigrant who has ever arrived somewhere and tried to understand it before it understood them. The wordlessness is the argument: immigration is the experience of not having the language, of navigating a reality that makes its own rules in a tongue you cannot speak, of finding kindness from strangers who were once in the same position and remember it. One of the most formally radical picture books ever made — it reads like a novel, rewards rereading at every age, and communicates something about the immigrant experience that language itself cannot quite reach. The most important book in the borders and belonging bundle for the youngest readers.

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