International Books

Yeah, I understand. Names where there are little dots over the letters scare you. Right?

But when you think about it, we come from a country where the first port of call for many folks arriving on the ferry is a place called Dún Laoghaire (pronounced 'done leery'). We are the winners when it comes to scary words. We have no business being scared of other people's weirdy spellings.

Now, we can't guarantee you that we'll never have an author with little dots in their name (come on, be reasonable), but that's where it stops, see. That is the whole point of translation – get it? The people who know the other language, they translate it for you, so when you open the book, the words on the inside are all in English.

So in the (far from unlikely) event that the author's name on the outside of a Little Island book has dots or even backwards fadas (oh, jeez!) or upside down circumflexes (nope, that is NOT a waist-reduction exercise, silly), we promise you faithfully that the thoughtful people at Little Island have made absolutely sure that the words inside the book are in English.

OK, so maybe the odd character is called Fridz or Rike – but, listen, you watch football. You can cope with people called Ruud, people called Ronaldinho, people called Trapa-blinkin-ttoni. I rest my wheely suitcase.

Little Island's first bunch of books, published this March, includes two books translated from German (remember Cornelia Funke? And you didn’t bat an eyelid!). Over the next little while, we are planning a book translated from Swedish (eat your heart out, Abba) and maybe even one from Brazilian Portuguese (you've heard of Brazil, right, where the nuts come from – no, no, NOT Ballydehob, Brazil). So watch this space, and don't worry, you won't need a dictionary.