Waterloo & Trafalgar

In his first wordless picture book, Olivier Tallec shows the pointlessness of war through his smart, comic, emotionally astute illustrations

Here Tallec portrays two characters, separated only by narrow walls, who watch each other ceaselessly through the seasons. Moving between day and night, long stretches at their binoculars, and mundane daily tasks, they fight their cold war, full of suspicion, never daring to bridge the gap between them.

As time passes, a snail shows up, and then a bird, and one day, to their utter surprise, they come face-to-face in a different way, and they discover that their differences don't make them enemies.

Waterloo & Trafalgar has a die-cut cover and interior section-cut flip pages, all of which contribute to allowing the reader to see things in different ways. And that, in the end, is so much of what this book is about: seeing and seeing otherwise.