New Releases by Matthew Olshan

Based on the true story of 19th-century naturalist Philip Henry Gosse''s study of Jamaican wildlife, this picture book illustrated by a Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe Award-winning artist, inspires empathy for the natural world and all its inhabitants. The Bird Thief is perfect for fans of Jason Chin’s Island and Jacqueline Davies’s The Boy Who Drew Birds. Isaac loves watching the long-tailed hummingbirds, known as Doctor Birds, that are native to his home island of Jamaica. It’s bad luck to hurt them, as his grandmother says. But that doesn’t stop an Englishman named Mr. Gosse from trapping these marvelous creatures for research. While his cousin Samuel helps with Mr. Gosse’s work, Isaac vows to set his beloved Doctor Birds free. What follows leads to a stirring change of heart and a trailblazing, more humane approach to the scientific study of nature. This richly illustrated picture book about the pioneering British naturalist Philip Henry Gosse (1810-1888) includes afterwords by the author Matthew Olshan and the artist Shadra Strickland, with notes on sources, recommendations for further reading, and photographs of Doctor Birds in the wild.

Mit dem Ballon von Grossbritannien nach Frankreich! Dr. Jeffries, ein Amerikaner, der lieber ein Engländer wäre, und sein französischer Pilot Monsieur Blanchard wollen unbedingt die Ersten sein, denen dieses waghalsige Vorhaben gelingt. Es gibt jedoch ein Problem: Die beiden können sich nicht ausstehen! Und so begeben sie sich am 7. Januar 1785 sehr missgelaunt gemeinsam in die Lüfte. Doch als sich wenig später die Ereignisse überschlagen und ihr Vorhaben zu scheitern droht, müssen die beiden Streithähne zusammenstehen, um wohlbehalten das französische Festland erreichen zu können.

In the year and a half since the flight of the first manned balloon in 1783, an Italian has flown, a Scot has flown, a woman has flown, even a sheep has flown. But no one has flown from one country to another. John Jeffries, an Englishman, and his pilot, Jean-Pierre Blanchard, a Frenchman, want to be the first. On January 7, 1785, they set out to cross the English Channel to France in a balloon. All seemed to be going fine, until Jeffries decides the balloon looks too fat and adjusts the air valve—how hard could it be? Too bad he drops the wrench over the side of the aerial car. With no way to adjust the valve, the balloon begins to sink. Jeffries and Blanchard throw as much as they can overboard—until there is nothing left, not even their clothes. Luckily, they come up with a clever (and surprising) solution that saves the day. A VOYAGE IN THE CLOUDS from Matthew Olshan and Sophie Blackall is a journey that will keep kids laughing the whole way. A Margaret Ferguson Book

"A first novel of considerable maturity: powerful, original, cunningly constructed, and timely." —Julian Barnes, author of The Sense of an Ending After years alone in a cell, an aging prisoner is released without explanation, expelled into a great city now utterly unfamiliar to him. Broken by years of brutality at the hands of the prison guards, he scrounges for scraps, sleeping wild, until a museum curator rescues him from an assault. The museum has just opened its most controversial exhibit: a perfect replica of the marshes, an expansive wilderness still wracked by conflict. There the man had spent years as a doctor among the hated and feared marshmen, who have been colonized but never conquered. Then Marshlands reveals one of its many surprises: it is written in reverse. The novel leaps backward once, twice, returning to the marshes and unraveling time to reveal the doctor''s ambiguous relationship to the austerely beautiful land and its people. As the pieces of his past come together, a great crime and its consequences begin to take shape. The true nature of the crime and who committed it will be saved for the breathtaking ending—or, rather, for the beginning. In the tradition of Wilfred Thesiger''s The Marsh Arabs and J. M. Coetzee''s Waiting for the Barbarians, Marshlands explores a culture virtually snuffed out under Saddam Hussein, and how we cement our identities by pointing at someone to call "other." Elegant, brief, and searing, Matthew Olshan''s Marshlands shivers with the life of a fragile, lost world.

In Paris, France, there lived a humble postman named Lalouche. He was small, but his hands were nimble, his legs were fast, and his arms were strong. When his job was replaced by an electric car, he turned to boxing to support himself and his pet finch, Genevieve. But--"You? A boxer?" the fighters asked. "I could sneeze and knock you down!" Still, Lalouche refused to give up. And perhaps small Lalouche was just nimble . . . just fast . . . and just strong enough to beat his fierce competitors. This is a marvelous story, full of humor and heart, and illustrated by Sophie Blackall, winner of a New York Times Best Illustrated Award.

Allele Island is a beachcomber''s paradise for a little primate named Eena Beena, who tends her stretch of beach, and the hapless creatures who wash up there, as if it were her own private garden. Then a deranged ape named Prospero arrives with plans to kidnap the island''s queen, sweeping Eena Beena into a calamity which takes her to the ends of the world--and seemingly to the end of time.

A pregnant Mexican woman and a teenage girl embark on a journey to California together. Along the way they discover modern America, and the trials each of them has faced in their lives.