The Travelling Lizard

Have you read The Lizard's Tail yet? It's a lovely story based on a Tamil folktale about a little lizard that's looking for a new tail. Adapted by Shobha Viswanath in prose and verse, this story has brilliant palette knife art by German illustrator Christine Kastl. The artist actually uses a knife, instead of a paint brush, with her palette to create beautiful artwork. Each page of this book is like a painting by itself.

And guess what! The Lizard's Tail is so popular that it's been translated into French and Korean to make it available to a wider range of young readers! 

Available in French from Ocean Editions as La Queue du Lezard, this book is widely distributed in France, Belgium and the Reunion Islands. Extremely popular and well-loved for its sophisticated artwork and charming plot, the book is doing extremely well in Europe. 

Claudine Serre, editor at Ocean Editions, visited us in Chennai in March 2010. It was absolutely wonderful to meet our charismatic French publisher. She thoroughly enjoyed looking at other picture books on our catalogues and hopes to make many more available in French soon!

The Lizard's Tail is not done travelling though! The book is also available in Korean! Maeng & Aeng Publishers have translated and published the book in Korea. Take a look at the colourful cover page they've used for the book!

Interestingly, the Korean edition of The Lizard's Tail has been highly commended by Jangone Korean, a popular bi-weekly educational magazine for children in Korea, because of the values and principles the book subtly espouses, as well as the lyrical, simple language used. 

We're hoping that we can soon make this book available in as many different languages as possible so that children and adults from all over the world can read this folktale and enjoy the beautiful illustrations.

From Karadi Tales, the book is available as an audiobook (book + audio CD)  narrated by Vidya Balan and textured with foot-tapping background music by 3 Brothers & A Violin and an exciting title track composed by Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy. 

It is also available as a beautiful hard cover picture book. 

If you haven't read it, do! The rest of the world has begun reading this story - and they're loving it!