Hundred: What You Learn in a Lifetime
Do you want to know what life has in store? It's all here in this book. All the little things we learn in the course of our lives. A page a year, from nought to a hundred.
5: You learn that boys and girls fall in love. Incredible!
13: When will your parents learn? Not in front of your friends.
36: A dream came true, but it feels different than you thought.
45: Do you like yourself as you are?
75: You learn to unlearn things. Can you still do a somersault?
86: Everything can be different in every moment.
How does our perception of the world change in the course of a lifetime? When Heike Faller's niece was born she began to wonder what we learn in life, and how we can talk about what we have learnt with those we love. And so she began to ask everyone she met, what did you learn in life? Out of the answers of children's writers and refugees, teenagers and artists, mothers and friends, came 99 lessons: that those who have had a difficult time appreciate the good moments more. That those who have had it easy find it harder getting old. That a lot of getting old is about accepting boundaries. And of course, as one 94 year old said to her, 'sometimes I feel like that little girl I once was, and I wonder if I have learned anything at all.'
A bestseller in Germany, HUNDRED is a book given by children to grandparents and the other way around, for christenings and Mother's days, significant birthdays and times of celebration. With every age beautifully illustrated by Valerio Vidali, Hundred cannot simply be read because, like life itself, it must be experienced.
Heike Faller grew up in Black Forest is now an editor at Zeitmagazin. As a staff writer at the Germany weekly Die Zeit she won the Axel-Springer Prize and the Henri-Nannen Prize. It has been a dream of hers to write a children's book like Hundred.
Valerio Vidali, born in 1983, is an award-winning Italian illustrator based in Berlin.