A World of Beauty

A World of Beauty: Tales from Pavlysh contains 19 charming little tales about the beauty of the natural world, and how nature supports all living creatures.

A chicken hatches some duck eggs. A rowan tree welcomes some beautiful crested birds to feed on its berries. A blade of grass slumbers through the winter and awakens to joyfully greet the spring. In some of the stories, people engage with this beauty. A child admires the magic beauty of a snowflake, “a six-pointed star, so beautiful and shiny, that a fairy-tale master might have cut it from a plate of silver”. A boy is woken at dawn by his father, and together they go to a field so they can listen to the song of a lark, “sprinkling the field with magic sounds”. A young girl breaks the thorns off an acacia so that a butterfly will not prick itself. In other stories, animals help each other. A hedgehog shares its winter shelter with a grasshopper. A squirrel shares a pinecone with a woodpecker.

All the stories, beautifully narrated by Jilly Bond, reflect the poetic vision of nature that Vasily Sukhomlinsky shared with students in his school in the Ukrainian village of Pavlysh.

The print and eBook editions of this audiobook are beautifully illustrated by students from Ukraine and Belarus.