Fans of Shaun Tan's work and newcomers alike will rejoice while getting lost in the pages of Creature: Paintings, Drawings, and Reflections, a stunning coffee-table collection of his artwork from 1995 to 2021. Tan provides only introductory essays to the four sections, beginning with "Lost Things" and closing with "Birds," allowing readers space to take in the images. Tan says he has "always been more attracted to an empathetic reading of otherness, quite far from the usual notion of a monster: something more like a companion." His works depict the uneasy relationship between nature and urban sprawl, the familiar and the strange. His art ranges to include an oil painting of a dugong on the front lawn of a Craftsman house in "Undertow" (from Tales from Outer Suburbia) and a spread of two dozen pencil renderings of "Emoticons" as vignettes of a one-eyed, rabbit-like creature displaying an array of emotions, moods and ideas. Notes about each piece at the end will inspire budding artists and allow devotees to go deeper (Tan's cover for The Arrival began as a self-portrait). --Jennifer M. Brown, senior editor, Shelf Awareness