"Sitting in his van for hours, he would brood over the great unrest of our times, how everything had gone to rack and ruin, invaded, unrecognisable."
"This call, Gloria sensed, was intended for her alone and for her freedom. Somebody was waiting for her, up north."
"Gloria was determined to understand everything. Sorrow, loves, wars, even children's games. During her long voyages in springtime and at the summer's end, Gloria roamed battlefields and burnt-out residential blocks. She followed wedding processions and families taking to the road in search of peace."
Every so often I read a book that just makes me sigh with happiness and marvel at the power and wonder of storytelling. With a book like this one - A Swallow in Winter - I want to rush out and buy a handful of copies to keep in my bag - why? Because I would love to thrust this book (and others such as Wishtree by Katherine Applegate and Captain Rosalie also by Timothee de Fombelle) into the hands of adults who challenge my love of children's books, who scoff at my passion for reading, almost exclusively, books written for children. At nearly every social occasion, especially over Christmas, I endure this kind of censure and I guess you can tell it annoys me.
I have listed this book as a French picture book but really it is a novella. It is a small, almost hand-sized volume with full colour and full page rich illustrations. A Swallow in Winter was written in 2019 in French and translated by Sarah Ardizzone into English in 2022. The French title is Quelqu'un m'attend derrière la neige. Take a look here to see inside this book.
There are three narrative threads in this story. The swallow from the title has decided not to follow her instinct to fly south and instead she has headed to the North on this cold snowy winter night. Her decision has come following an accident many years ago where she crashed into the coloured window of a church. Later we discover her name is Gloria.
The second narrative thread is where we meet a man who drives an ice cream van. Freddy d'Angelo has worked for the gelato company - Pepino & schultz for thirty-seven years. It is Christmas Eve and he is driving from Genoa to London. His van contains six hundred tubs in two flavours - almond milk and chestnut.
"Freddy had been counting. It would soon be a hundred days since anybody had spoken to him properly."
So we have a tiny bird flying through the cold night. We have a lonely man in his truck who has never even tasted the ice cream he delivers. But what of the third narrative thread? Sorry dear reader but I am not going to share this with you. I will only say the ending of this story is sure to surprise, delight and shock you. At the end of this small volume Timothee de Fombelle will take you to an extraordinary story destination.
Thomas Campi is an Italian illustrator. One critic said "Delicately put into images by the Italian cartoonist Thomas Campi, who produces almost every two pages of superb illustrations in warm and rich colours, this text proves to be as unclassifiable as its heroes."
This might be a spoiler but take a close look at this illustration:
In this short French video, Timothee de Fombelle reads from his book - and you can hear a soft sound track of Frank Sinatra which Freddy, the truck driver, plays on his old cassette player all year round.
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