Anna and the Swallow Man

Instead of passing on to his daughter one particular language that would define her, Anna’s father gave her the wide spectrum of tongues that he knew, and said, “Choose amongst them. Make something new for yourself.”

Krakow, 1939, is no place to grow up.

There are a million marching soldiers and a thousand barking dogs. And Anna Lania is just seven years old when the Germans take her father and suddenly, she's alone.

Then she meets the Swallow Man.

He is a mystery, strange and tall. And like Anna's missing father, he has a gift for languages: Polish, Russian, German, Yiddish, even Bird. When he summons a bright, beautiful swallow down to his hand to stop her from crying, Anna is entranced.

Over the course of their travels together, Anna and the Swallow Man will dodge bombs, tame soldiers, and even, despite their better judgement, make a friend. But in a world gone mad, everything can prove dangerous...

Striking a chord with Waterstones’ booksellers who have described it as heartbreaking, lyrical and deeply evocative, Anna and the Swallow Man is a stunning, literary, and wholly original debut novel that tells a new WW2 story.

‘There’s a part of being a child (maybe the most important part) that too many people get rid of as they go along in the world, and that’s the part that formulates and asks the questions. In devising the character of the Swallow Man, it became clear to me that he was a man of a very particular sort of magic – the subtle, difficult-to-pin-down sort – and Anna is, perhaps, in distilled human form, the part of each kid that notices that the man without the umbrella in the middle of the sidewalk is somehow bone dry.’ – Gavriel Savit

‘The lesson here, and in the novel’s conclusion, is surely not that beauty and faith and love are illusory, or even that they are fleeting. It is that they take hard work to maintain, and require, as often as not, personal sacrifice.’ – The New York Times

• Publisher: Penguin Random House Children's UK
• ISBN: 9780141376646
• Number of pages: 256
• Weight: 181g
• Dimensions: 198 x 129 x 16 mm