Author & Illustrators

Yuval Zommer Books

The Big Book of Nature Art

Non-fiction

Featuring twenty-two easy craft projects using natural and recycled materials, The Big Book of Nature Art is a fun and eco way for young children to connect creatively with nature.

From bestselling author Yuval Zommer, The Big Book of Nature Art is packed with twenty-two easy art activities inspired by nature. Each of the activities can be achieved in four simple steps using natural materials combined with recycled or found materials from around the home. Drawing on Zommer’s years of experience running art workshops for children, The Big Book of Nature Art includes his tips for stress-free ways to get creative with kids.

Each nature art activity requires no more than five minutes set-up and five minutes clean-up, making them easy to achieve and fun for everyone involved. The book also encourages children to see the creative potential in the natural and everyday treasures all around us – from twigs, seed pods, petals and leaves through to loo rolls, pencil shavings, takeaway cutlery and kitchen string.

Little nature artists will enjoy making paper-plate birds; leaf bugs; coffee-cup owls; tree bark bats; and seed pod creepy crawlies, as well as scenes for their creatures to dwell in, from watery worlds to underground tunnels.

The Wild

Yuval Zommer

Picturebook

Popular picturebook creator Yuval Zommer returns with a beautifully illustrated modern fable with an environmental theme, which sees the ‘wild’ take on its own animal-like character (perhaps a dog or a wolf), artistically made up of trees, shrubs, rivers, plains and all sorts of details from the natural world. The Wild faces challenges caused by human activity, and the beauty and freedom of the Wild clearly decline as the story progresses. Despite the striking damage caused to the Wild, there is still scope for the Wild to be cared for and to thrive again if collective action is taken and the tone at the end is hopeful and encouraging in a manner appropriate to the age of the target audience.

I loved the illustrations and that ‘the wild’ is in the shape of an animal. It serves as a really good reminder of how the land is there for living creatures to enjoy but that they also have to respect the wild and take care of it. It then shows how humans have taken advantage of the wild and taken too much from it, damaging the wild rather than caring for it. I also love the message at the end that one voice alone is not enough, but many voices can get across a message about climate change and the damage that has been done to the wild. Too often, you hear people say that one person making a change won’t make a difference to climate change, but the end of the book points out that every change in someone’s home or in someone’s city will make a difference, which is an important message.

This stunningly illustrated story could provide a gentle introduction to climate change for younger children but would also be very thought-provoking for older children, already aware of climate change. The book would be a good choice for assemblies and PSHE time across the whole school, or to include in classroom libraries for children to enjoy and muse upon at their pace.

The Woolly Bear Caterpillar

Julia Donaldson & Yuval Zommer

Picturebook

From Julia Donaldson, bestselling author of The Gruffalo, and award-winning illustrator Yuval Zommer, comes a charming minibeast Cinderella story.

Crawling through the garden, the little Woolly Bear Caterpillar wonders what kind of moth she will become. Bonny and bright, stunning and smart, but not kind, the other caterpillars laugh at the small, plain Woolly Bear. There is one thing that they are sure of: Woolly Bear could never be as dramatic and beautiful as them! But could one little caterpillar be about to undergo a truly terrific transformation?

Brilliantly written and stunningly illustrated this engaging picture book comes complete with a non-fiction mini book about caterpillars and moths written by a nature specialist.

The Lights that Dance in the Night

Yuval Zommer

Picturebook

For story times on starry nights with the blackest skies – comfort and warmth will be readily found in Yuval Zommer’s Northern Lights inspired picture book The Lights that Dance in the Night. Completing Yuval’s ‘winter trilogy’, this is a lyrical celebration of the Northern Lights. From tiny specs of dust to gleaming rays in the dark, the Northern Lights travel across the Arctic, uniting every creature in a celebration that reverberates through land and sea. Illustrated in Yuval Zommer’s compelling style, this is a dreamy and gentle story poem that is perfect for bedtime with little ones or cosy classroom story sessions inspiring children to want to seek out the wonders of the sky at night.

The Tree That’s Meant to Be

Yuval Zommer

Picturebook

The story is about a little fir tree that is too small and too imperfect’ to be chosen to be decorated at Christmas time. He is different from the other trees around him and ever since being a sapling he knew it was “plain to see that I was never, ever going to be a perfect, grown-up tree.”

As families choose the other trees as Christmas trees, the little fir tree is left alone in the forest. Before long, the forest animals gather around the lonely little tree to offer festive cheer and encouragement that the creatures great and small appreciate him just as he is. The story ends with a happy springtime scene with the tree providing a home for forest animals and a shelter for two children reading their books, alongside the tree’s warm assertion that he is ‘the tree that’s meant to be.’ At every stage, Zommer’s beautiful illustrations are charming and filled with details and patterns that tell of the joys of looking closely at nature.

This is a hope-filled book with the natural world at its heart, cutting through the commercialism of the festive season to offer a gentle and encouraging message about celebrating difference and finding one’s place in the world.

A Thing Called Snow

Yuval Zommer

Picturebook

This gorgeous picturebook explores the gentle magic of snow. Young readers who may have only experienced real snow once or twice – or perhaps never – will relate to spring-born friends Fox and Hare, who hear rumours of a thing called snow coming as winter arrives, but need to know what exactly snow is.

Their search takes them on a journey through Zommer’s beautifully illustrated forest scenes to ask a host of animal friends about snow until, at last, they experience the ‘whitest, coldest, fluffiest, sparkliest snow’ for themselves.

The Big Book of Beasts

Yuval Zommer

Non-fiction

This award-winning book showcases wild and wonderful beasts, from tigers and brown bears to binturongs and Ice Age beasts. Hugely popular in primary classrooms due to its vibrant, appealing illustrations and accessible and interesting style of text, this informative compendium is the kind of non-fiction that children like to come back to again and again. You may also like the other books in the series, The Big Book of Bugs and The Big Book of the Blue.

The Big Book of Belonging

Yuval Zommer

Non-fiction

Fans of Yuval Zommer’s Big Book series may have been guessing which alliterative topic was next to come after poring over the previous Big Book of the Blue, The Big Book of Birds, the Big Book of Bugs and the Big Book of Beasts. I wonder how many – if any – correctly landed on ‘Belonging’ as the theme of the latest large-format hardback in this much-loved collection.

The Big Book of Belonging aims to unite young readers from around the globe under one banner – of belonging to planet Earth. In his foreword, the author says, “The Big Book of Belonging is my way of celebrating the wondrous connections between us humans and the natural world. From the air that we breathe, the food we eat, the adventures we seek, to the joy we experience, you will find a connection to nature in every single part of our being. And the more we can reconnect with nature, the more we can reconnect with ourselves.”

Illustrated in full colour in Yuval Zommer’s iconic style, the book is packed with natural history facts that draw out just how much a part of the natural world humans are. Readers may be surprised to discover that sea otters hold hands just like humans do, or that scientists believe that listening to bird song can boost the hormones in our bodies that help us to concentrate and focus better, and that butterflies also have bedtimes. They’ll learn that just as humans have unique fingerprints, zebras have different stripes, cowrie shells have distinct spots and that no two snowflakes are identical.

As well as a host of interesting facts, readers will come across a range of familiar knowledge too – like how leaves fall from trees in Autumn or how frogs start life as frogspawn. Each page of facts is presented as part of a connection between humans and nature – the leaves fall off trees just as human hair falls out when we brush it or male fallow deer shed and regrow their antlers every year.

The book’s uplifting tone, super-short snippets of facts and full colour illustrations make it suitable for younger children looking to collect information without becoming overhwhelmed as well as for older children looking to dive into the connections between the facts they know. This is a lovely book for sharing and discussing, making it a highly suitable choice for primary classrooms.

The Big Book of Birds

Yuval Zommer

Non-fiction

The Big Book of Birds is a delight for readers young and old. This visually appealing information book showcases the splendour of all sorts of birds, from flamingoes and kingfishers to red-crowned cranes and hoopoes.

Part of a series that also includes The Big Book of Bugs and The Big Book of the Blue, this is the kind of book that is magnetic in drawing in readers in a primary classroom. Yuval Zommer’s winning formula combines vibrant and quirky illustrations with short bursts of accessible text, united in a large-sized compendium that is perfect to gather round and pore over.

Each double-page spread dives into a different avian-themed question, such as ‘Why can’t some birds fly?’, ‘Is a bald eagle really bald?’ and ‘Why does a bird have a beak instead of lips?’. There is never too much text on each page, but what you find is accessible chunks of information interspersed into each illustrated scene. There are interactive aspects too, with extra elements to spot throughout the book. The illustrations are filled with visual delights for young eyes, with text and images working together to build an understanding of the amazing diversity of the bird family tree as well as well-explained insights into their fascinating behaviours and habitats.

A winner of a book to treasure and share, this is highly recommended for readers across the whole primary school.

The Skies Above My Eyes

Charlotte Guillain & Yuval Zommer

Picturebook

Some books are made for sharing and ‘The Skies Above My Eyes’ is a wonderful example of one. The book folds out into a beautifully-illustrated 2.5m long double-sided journey up through the layers of the atmosphere, with small chunks of informative text along the way.

Starting on ground level with a girl standing on a busy street, readers can follow her gaze upwards to pass towering skyscrapers, various aircraft and space vehicles and finally to planets and stars. On the reverse, the girl lays on the grass at the foot of a mountain, looking up towards birds, paragliders, through weather systems, meteoroids and comets.

Much like its predecessor ‘The Street Beneath My Feet’, this book is likely to be a huge hit in the classroom as children will love gathering around the fully folded-out pages to pore over the many details and facts hidden around the different layers of the atmosphere. The text helps to direct the reader to tiny details that they may not have already spotted in the illustrations. Reading the information from the bottom to the top on one side and then the opposite way round on the reverse feels like jumping into a spacecraft and blasting off on a trip to the ends of the solar system and then descending back to the Earth’s surface.

Yuval Zommer’s bold and bright illustrations are hugely appealing and joyful as he masterfully captures the variation of hues and textures that make the skies above us such a visual delight. The thick paper of the book’s concertina pages feels durable and ready to withstand being opened out and refolded many times.

This is a book that young readers will love to treasure and share and one that will hold a strong appeal across the whole primary age range.

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