“When it snows, Lucas, it means that the angels are moulting,” Lucas’s granddad once told him. Lucas remembers those words when he steps out into a world of whiteness on the final day of the year. On his long walk that morning, the memories come tumbling down through his mind like snowflakes. Lucas has a lot of things to remember – his dad, for example. When they had that sunny holiday on Terschelling, his dad was still around, but now he’s dead and buried. And eating cherries in the long grass with Isabel, the girl with the red hair. So many things that felt so good and carefree last summer are now over. Or was everything not quite as wonderful as Lucas would like to remember?…

Children’s writer Koos Meinderts began his career with cabaret songs and now, for the second time, he has turned one of those songs into a picture book. De man in de wolken (The Man in the Clouds) is a philosophical parable, with melancholy illustrations supplied by Annette Fienieg.

Koos Meinderts is not a writer of absolute truths, preferring instead to support the right to daydream. The humble bear Zebedeus is a perfect example of a Meinderts character. Zebedeus hesitates, wavers, hums and haws. One day, he receives a surprise in the post, a parcel containing a board game, the Game of Goose. ‘You can’t win, but you can’t lose either. All you can do is play,’ says Wisse, the mysterious sender, in his accompanying letter. The game is a metaphor for life and Zebedeus plays it as well as he can. Along the way, he has philosophical conversations with the characters he meets — conversations about freedom and choosing your own path, about…