The most beautiful stone

★A new, stunningly beautiful picture book from Polish illustrator Joanna Concejo, known for "The Man Without a Name," "The Lost Soul," and "Big and Little Brothers"!
★A poetic and allegorical picture book that immerses readers in cloud-like imagery, leaving a lasting impression.

"There are no lakes here, no rivers or streams.
The water doesn't flow, it collects in deep puddles, trapped in the mud, dormant in the mire.
Here, there are only swamps."
 
Joanna Concejo, a Polish illustrator with a distinctive and unique style and delicate, profound drawings, is beloved by readers worldwide and frequently invited to collaborate with various authors on picture books. Following "The Lost Soul," which depicted Nobel Literature laureate Olga Tokarczuk, she now collaborates with French children's author Gilles Baum, a former math teacher, to create a breathtakingly beautiful work.
 
Joanna, who once said, "Images should not repeat what words have already said," immediately draws readers into an atmosphere akin to The Beatles' famous song "A Day in the Life" with a series of panoramic and album-like fragmented images at the book's beginning. You see the changing light and shadows on the lake surface, as if at different times, ever-shifting yet day after day. After the title page, the art style shifts to delicate pencil and colored pencil, and the narrative enters a new context:
 
"People got used to staying in the water, living like carp.
Some days, no one spoke a word.
In a village without a horizon, silence was the best company.
Days passed by like that."
 
So people became accustomed to always gazing downwards—in this muddy world, it was the only possible way to look. However, one night, something extraordinary happened: light and orange hues filled the sky. In that moment, for the first time, the residents looked up, and the children, whose curiosity was only now awakened, were the first to surface, wanting to investigate (turning the page, Joanna inserts a beautiful scene of sunlight filtering through treetops, viewed from below).
 
The children discovered a peculiar person skipping stones across the water, creating beautiful melodies. Using the image of "skipping stones" as a catalyst, the world originally filled with mud, silence, and sorrow was replaced by wonder and beauty—until that magnificent finale.
 
Illustrator Joanna Concejo's colored pencil strokes infuse the words of French teacher and mathematician Gilles Baum with a world that is at times serene and melancholic, at others vibrant and sparkling. Gilles said, "I had to be the narrator of that luminous moment, to record that instant of 'human resurrection.' The story unfolded before me so vividly. This time, finding an ending wasn't difficult; it was born in the trajectory of the last skipped stone—that skip was more perfect than any before it:What if that stone never stopped?"
 
And Joanna said, "I think it's best to keep things in suspense, not to over-define or label. I'm a little afraid of 'language,' afraid of the power of words to fix things, words can sometimes weaken or truncate things, making them too clear and losing other possible meanings. I like the ambiguous quality of images; it's my communication with the reader's senses. So, I never presuppose an interpretation; my job is simply not to hinder any possibilities of understanding."
 
Just as Wei Chih-hsiu, the translator of "Big and Little Brothers," said in a book review, "Joanna seems to constantly invite different creators to collaborate with her on an artwork... She not only presents a creator's strong characteristics in her unique painting style but also, almost obsessively, uses the stories provided by these authors (or herself) to continually use images to dialectically explore the same themes of time, memory, and life. Or rather, she uses her unique stream of consciousness in images to lay out a story space that is larger and more detached from reality than words can carry." This book can be said to once again embody this creative style.
  The Italian book review media "Libri Manent" also praised this book: "This poetic and visionary picture book leads us into the world created by Joanna Concejo. She excellently restores the 'dreamlike imbalance' that runs throughout the book, immersing readers in cloud-like imagery, leaving a lasting impression."
 
"Like a river willing to disappear to meet the sea."