The Café at the Edge of the Woods

What’s it about?

The story.

At the edge of the woods sits a café, and into it walks an ogre. The ogre is very hungry. The menu is not quite what it expected. What follows is a sequence of increasingly improbable dishes, a cast of woodland creature regulars who watch in horror, and a café owner whose composure, and creative catering solutions, should be the envy of the service industry. Mikey Please writes in rhyming verse that manages the rare trick of being funny, perfectly paced, and genuinely surprising on every page, and his illustrations have the quality of animation stills brought to life: each image densely detailed, richly coloured, and full of visual jokes that reward a second and third read. The book turns on the kind of absurdist logic children find instinctively satisfying, the monstrous made polite, the revolting made delicious, and the warmth underneath the comedy makes it something to come back to. One of the most talked-about picture book debuts of recent years: a Waterstones Children's Book Prize winner that earns every word of its praise.