“Where is the center of the sea? / Why don’t the waves break there? … Do you hear explosions of yellow / in the middle of the fall?” Pablo Neruda’s Book of Questions is beloved by Spanish speakers, both children and adults. This beautifully designed bilingual edition includes 70 of the original 320 questions, presented in both their original Spanish and an English translation. The questions are set against Chilean artist Paloma Valdivia’s gorgeous, stylized illustrations full of animals and other elements of nature, including some human figures, and inanimate objects. Her rich but judiciously limited primary palette features shades of blue, red, and yellow on predominantly black backgrounds, adding to the sense of mystery and wonder the narrative can inspire. The questions, which range from playful to dreamy to existential, are prompts for contemplation and expression and offer spark after spark of inspiration for young readers’ and listeners’ imaginations. (Age 5 and older)

Where is the center of the sea? Why do the waves never break there? A book containing unanswerable, fantastical questions, inviting us to be curious, while simultaneously embracing what we cannot know.

A New York Times Best Children's Book of 2022

A Marginalian (fka Brain Pickings) Favorite Book of 2022

A New York Times Bestseller!
A USBBY Outstanding International Book of 2023

A 2023 Bologna Ragazzi Award Amazing Bookshelf Selection

Selected for the Academy of American Poets 2022 Featured Fall Books List for Young Readers
Starred reviews in The Horn Book, Kirkus, SLJ, and PW!

This bilingual Spanish-English edition is the first illustrated selection of questions, 70 in all, from Pablo Neruda's original poem (320 questions) The Book of Questions.

Holding the wonder and mystery of childhood and the experience and knowing that come with growing up, these questions are by turns lyrical, strange, surreal, spiritual, historical and political. They foreground the natural world, and their curiosity transcends all logic; and because they are paradoxes and riddles that embrace the limits of our ability to know, they engage with human freedom in the deepest way, removing the burden and constraint that somehow, we are meant to have answers to every question.

Gorgeously, cosmically illustrated by Paloma Valdivia, here Neruda's questions, already visual in themselves, gain a double visuality that makes them even more palpable and resonant. So clearly rooted in Chilean landscapes as they are, the questions are revealed as a communion with nature and its mysteries.