The Only Child

A New York Times Best Illustrated Book

Hailed by Entertainment Weekly and the Wall Street Journal as a best book of the year, this gorgeous and imaginative story—part picture book, part graphic novel—is utterly transporting and original. USA Today declared it “a compelling and melancholy debut from an important new talent" as well as "an expansive and ageless book full of wonder, sadness, and wild bursts of imagination.” And like Shaun Tan's The Arrival and Raymond Briggs's The Snowman, it is quickly becoming a modern classic.
 
A little girl—lost and alone—follows a mysterious stag deep into the woods, and, like Alice down the rabbit hole, she finds herself in a strange and wondrous world. But... home and family are very far away. How will she get back there?
 
In this magnificently illustrated—and wordless—masterpiece, debut artist Guojing brilliantly captures the rich and deeply-felt emotional life of a child, filled with loneliness and longing as well as love and joy.

“A haunting, wordless, gorgeously drawn picture book.” —People

“Told wordlessly through soft, dreamy illustrations, Guojing’s tale evokes the loneliness of growing up under China’s one-child policy.” —Entertainment Weekly

“A dreamy, wordless debut.” —The New York Times

"Majestic.... Rare is the book containing great emotional depth that truly resonates across a span of ages: this is one such." —Kirkus Reviews, Starred

"Reminiscent of Raymond Briggs’s classic, The Snowman (1978), this is quiet, moving, playful, and bittersweet all at once." —Booklist, Starred

Guojing is an illustrator from the Shanxi Province of China. Since graduating from the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts, she has worked as a concept artist for games and animated television shows. Due to China's birth control policy, Guojing is an only child, and she has drawn on her childhood memories of loneliness and isolation while developing this, her first book.