(Querido Kind, 2014, 30 pages)

‘Ah, go and ride your bike!’ shouts Willem the dog in an argument with his husband, Boese the panda. In Dutch, that means something along the lines of ‘Just go away! Figure it out for yourself!’

(Hoogland & Van Klaveren, 2015, 128 pages)

Thanks to Anne Frank and her diary, the story of the occupation of the Netherlands in World War II is known all over the world. Anyone who wants to find out more about the subject can read books by hundreds of authors. However, many of those accounts are missing something essential: how it really feels to find yourself, from one day to the next, living in a world of danger and uncertainty.

(Gottmer, 2017, 32 pages)

The idea is simple, in this fourth part of a series by Joukje Akveld. It’s a book with the same question on each page: which of the four animals on the right owns the tail on the left? You find out the answer by turning the page.

(Gottmer, 2017, 224 pages)

Cheetahs who hardly ever breed, rhinoceroses on the run from armed poachers, penguins who get in the way, pesky bag-stealing baboons. Journalist and writer Joukje Akveld hitches a ride on a cargo ship to South Africa and visits shelters for wild animals with problems.

(Lannoo, 2022, 96 pages)

‘A history of humankind without animals would be an incomplete history,’ writes Joukje Akveld. ‘That’s why this book is about them. And because we humans have already told our story often enough, it is the animals themselves who are doing the talking here.’ This original premise results in twenty-nine fascinating and colourful animal testimonies in words and pictures, which take the reader from the Botswana of 200,000 years ago to present-day South Africa.