My New Shirt

Receiving the yearly birthday gift from his grandmother has become David's living nightmare. The "surprise" she always has for him never varies. How can he stop this never-ending flow of stiff, white, scratchy shirts "perfect gentlemen" shirts that make him squirm and pull and shift and twitch? David closes his eyes and imagines a long line of shirts one for every year of his life stretching on forever. Then suddenly, without really intending to, he has done the unthinkable. "DAVID!" his mother screams. And when David opens his eyes, there are his mother, his father, and his bubbie staring at him. The shirt is no longer in his hands. He has thrown it out the window! Now it is out on the street, in the jaws of his dog, and the very merry chase is on. Bitingly funny and keenly observed,My New Shirtis graphically presented as a photo album commemorating David's desperate act of liberation from a family tradition badly in need of a change.

Cary Fagan is an award-winning writer for both young readers and adults. In addition to several picture books published with Tundra, he also wrote the award-winning biography of Chan Hon Goh, Beyond the Dance: A Ballerina’s Life. He has won a Mr. Christie’s Silver Medal for Daughter of the Great Zandini, a City of Toronto Book Award for his first adult novel, and the Jewish Book Committee Prize for Fiction. Cary Fagan lives in Toronto.

Du¢san Petri¢ci´c is the award-winning illustrator of more than twenty books for children including Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes published by Bloomsbury in September 2004. A former professor of illustration and book design, Petri¢ci´c’s work appears in The New York Times, Scientific American, The Wall Street Journal, and The Toronto Star. He lives in Toronto.