What Nonsense!

Sally Mo is thirteen. At three, she learned to read—and since then she has only been doing that—quite literally living in books. Her passion for reading was always encouraged by the closest person—her beloved grandfather David, with whom she could discuss any book and talk heart to heart. When Grandpa dies, Sally Mo copes with her grief through reading and slowly begins to lose touch with the real world. Her mother brings Sally Mo to psychologist Dr. Bloom, and he suggests she spend three months without touching books. She can only observe the world, think, and write in a diary. And then Sally Mo decides: why not write a book of her own, if reading is forbidden? But the line between truth and fiction in her story is so thin that sometimes you can’t tell whether everything happened for real—or whether Sally Mo made it up.

In 2020, Shurd Kuyper’s novel received the “Silver Pencil” award for the best children’s book. The book “Nonsense!” is narrated by theatre director and actress Polina Airapetova of the “Workshop of Pyotr Fomenko.”

· A new book by Dutch writer Shurd Kuyper, author of the novel “Hotel ‘Big L’.”
· A book that makes you think a lot while reading, because it’s not always clear what really happened and what Sally Mo imagined.
· Like Hamlet asking “To be or not to be?”, the book asks readers many questions that don’t have a clear answer: what are the pros and cons of reading books? Can you change the world on your own? What role does literature play in a person’s life? How do power and money influence our world? Is there such a thing as “truth”?
· An incredibly literary language, yet simple and clear—without artificial embellishment or verbal decoration. The book can be taken apart into quotes.
· Shurd Kuyper is a multiple winner of the prestigious “Silver Pencil” literary award for best children’s book, and a laureate of the national award Theo Teijssen.
• An excellent translation by Iryna Leichenko and Iryna Mykhailova, which accurately conveys Kuyper’s distinctive authorial style.