The Book of Clouds

What’s it about?

The story.

What if clouds had secret lives of their own? This translated collection from the Latvian-Swedish poet Juris Kronbergs gathers twenty-five short poems about the sky, blending genuine meteorology with pure daydream. Alongside child-friendly guides to the different kinds of cloud sit poems imagining the fantasy lives clouds might lead, so that fact and fancy drift together like weather. Anete Melece's watercolour and collage illustrations fill the pages with soft, shifting skies, and there is room left for young readers to note their own observations of the clouds above them. Translated into English by Mara Rozitis and Richard O'Brien and published by the independent Emma Press, it is a quietly beautiful book that rewards slow reading and rereading. Part poetry, part nature notebook, it encourages children to look up, name what they see, and let their imaginations wander among the cumulus and cirrus.