One Last Thing

"Daddy, please can I say one last thing?" 
 
Mattie is going to bed - she definitely is... She has just one more thing to say before she goes to sleep. 
 
However that one more thing turns out to be a fantastical adventure which guides Mattie and Daddy round the house in pursuit of the tricky, twisty Great Pampoose. But will Mattie ever get to bed? 
 
Celebrating imaginative play amidst the battle of bedtime, these awardwinning first-time collaborators bring to life a rich world of adventure at home.

Natalia O’Hara (Author) Natalia and Lauren are two sisters from the North of England. In the daytime they edit scripts and design sets, and at night they draw and write together. As children they loved fairytales, animal fables and the stories their Polish grandmother told on snowy nights. Hortense and the Shadow is their first picture book. Lizzy Stewart (Illustrator) Lizzy Stewart is an author based in London. She writes and illustrates books for both children and adults. In 2017 her picture book There’s a Tiger in the Garden won the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize and a World Illustration Award. Her debut full-length novel Alison was published in 2022. She teaches Illustration at Goldsmiths, University of London and has also taught courses at the Tate and on behalf of the National Gallery.

&quot;Daddy, please can I say one last thing?&quot; 
 
Mattie is going to bed - she definitely is... She has just one more thing to say before she goes to sleep. 
 
However that one more thing turns out to be a fantastical adventure which guides Mattie and Daddy round the house in pursuit of the tricky, twisty Great Pampoose. But will Mattie ever get to bed? 
 
Celebrating imaginative play amidst the battle of bedtime, these awardwinning first-time collaborators bring to life a rich world of adventure at home.

Lizzy Stewart

[A] houseshare horror story… Stewart is brilliant at capturing the glorious intimacies of close friendships as well as their pitfalls

Glorious... it perfectly captures the disaffection and disappointments of early mid-life... beautifully nuanced... If you think you don’t read graphic novels, Lizzy Stewart will make you reconsider.

‘Satisfyingly detailed and juicy, it’s an utter treat and I will be giving a copy to my best friend’

A novel I have recently loved to bits. By the inimitable Lizzy Stewart... Friendship, ambition, class, houses, the 1970s - 1990s, love, and coloured illustrations, of course. She’s so damn good

The Wreck is a completely magnetic piece of work. In her story of two couples, Stewart explores class, desire, friendship, ambition and the endless mysteries of human behaviour with fearless clarity

Sophie Elmhirst, author of MAURICE AND MARALYN

Lizzy Stewart’s characters feel to me like friends. I want to have a drink with them, hug them, shake them…. The Wreck is a tender and wise portrait of love and friendship that ponders with an astonishingly light touch big questions to do with who we are and how we live. She’s done it again!

A beautiful, poignant study of friendship as it shifts from light to shade and back again over a lifetime. Lizzy Stewart’s characters are so finely drawn that we see and feel their every move. The Wreck is a brilliantly insightful tale of careful manners and caustic undercurrents, all wrapped up in the disheveled tastefulness of the country house. Utterly charming, with a thrillingly critical edge.

Friendship, love and a gorgeous old house. A beautiful story beautifully told. I loved inhabiting The Wreck

Jessica Stanley, author of CONSIDER YOURSELF KISSED

I fell hopelessly in love with The Wreck. Lizzy Stewart has created the most inviting, appealing world for her endlessly compelling characters, whose charm and flaws kept me glued to their dramas and entanglements throughout, and left me utterly bereft at the end. A beautiful, funny, clever, insightful book about friendship, desire and idealism, that tackles the great universal question of how to live.

What a rare treat to read a graphic novel that deals with love and sex from a sophisticated female perspective. Propulsive and addictive, The Wreck is a dream house filled with deep truths about relationships and yearning for a bigger, freer life, and I wanted to inhabit it forever.

Astrid Goldsmith, author of THE CRYSTAL VASE

Impressive, immersive and full of knotty psychological insight

Joff Winterhart, author of DEAR HISTORIAN

A one-of-a-kind novel: a perfectly-judged story of friendship and mistakes, love, intimacy and the passing of time. I adored every page of it.

Ana Kinsella, author of FRIDA SLATTERY AS HERSELF

Lizzy Stewart has done it again: written and drawn another wonderful book. The Wreck is incredibly intimate and domestic but also astonishingly universal.

Claire Fuller, author of UNSETTLED GROUND

No other writer or artist can pinpoint the queasy interdependence of class and the arts in England with such nauseous accuracy, only to pull the rug out from under us with tenderness

I adored this... [an] intimate tale of class, envy, love and friendship

Bookseller *10 titles not to miss in April*

'I loved Lizzy Stewart's The Wreck, an exquisitely drawn and expertly calibrated tale of friendship, sex, class and property and the dangerous, contested places where they meet

A wonderful book- it's rare to find a novel which so wholeheartedly resists the urge to judge its characters. I love, too, how completely it fits its form, with the nuances of the characters' body language which are visible in the drawings bleeding into the text, changing the way that it's read. It felt to me that it was a story which couldn't possibly have been told in any other way

'Satisfyingly detailed and juicy... an utter treat' Amy Liptrot 
 
'Friendship, love and a gorgeous old house. A beautiful story beautifully told. I loved inhabiting The Wreck' Jessica Stanley 
 
Two couples pursue their dream of communal living in the English countryside – and then it all comes tumbling down 
 
Charlotte and Francesca were best friends at university in the mid-1970s. But tensions coursed beneath their natural affection, deepening when Fran got together with Charlotte’s friend Adrian, and the two women drifted apart. 
 
When Fran contacts Charlotte out of the blue with an unusual proposal – an invitation to live with her and Adrian in the rambling house they’ve bought in the countryside – Charlotte impulsively persuades her partner, Bill, to accept this tantalising promise of a new kind of community. 
 
At first their new life feels utopian; life and space are shared joyfully. But it doesn’t take long for old tensions to rise to the surface, shattering their illusions and showing each of them in a new light. 
 
The Wreck is a glorious genre-defying illustrated novel about the messy tangle of love, envy and desire that underpins our most precious relationships, and the difficult paths we must take to discover our true selves. 
 
 
'I fell hopelessly in love with The Wreck... A beautiful, funny, clever, insightful book' Lisa Owens 
 
'A one-of-a-kind novel. I adored every page of it' Ana Kinsella 
 
'A tender and wise portrait of love and friendship' Chloë Ashby

Lizzy Stewart

Praise for The Wreck

[A] houseshare horror story… Stewart is brilliant at capturing the glorious intimacies of close friendships as well as their pitfalls

Glorious... it perfectly captures the disaffection and disappointments of early mid-life... beautifully nuanced... If you think you don’t read graphic novels, Lizzy Stewart will make you reconsider.

‘Satisfyingly detailed and juicy, it’s an utter treat and I will be giving a copy to my best friend’

[A] houseshare horror story… Stewart is brilliant at capturing the glorious intimacies of close friendships as well as their pitfalls

Glorious... it perfectly captures the disaffection and disappointments of early mid-life... beautifully nuanced... If you think you don’t read graphic novels, Lizzy Stewart will make you reconsider.

‘Satisfyingly detailed and juicy, it’s an utter treat and I will be giving a copy to my best friend’

[A] houseshare horror story… Stewart is brilliant at capturing the glorious intimacies of close friendships as well as their pitfalls

Glorious... it perfectly captures the disaffection and disappointments of early mid-life... beautifully nuanced... If you think you don’t read graphic novels, Lizzy Stewart will make you reconsider.

‘Satisfyingly detailed and juicy, it’s an utter treat and I will be giving a copy to my best friend’

Books by Lizzy Stewart

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