The artwork is glorious; blocky and colourful, beautifully imaginative and full of life, the art adds a gloriously inventive dimension to this thoughtful, clever book. (…)
It is a wonderful, playful exploration of a difficult topic and I highly recommend it.
---Blog Making Them Readers, September 2013

A beautiful book that’s good for all ages. It does a great job of starting conversations about existence, life, death and change.
---Blog Read It Real Good, January 2016

A wise, disarmingly simple rumination on the idea that disappearance is really only change.
---Kirkus Review, August 2013

A gentle but persistent exploration of all the possible answers to an as yet un-answered question. Martins’ text is typically poetic and strikes the right balance between pensive and humorous to tackle the disappearance of family, friendships, socks and rocks.
---Anna Riddley in LOOK / BOOK magazine, September 2013

★Rights sold: Brazilian Portuguese, English, French, Galician, Korean, Polish, Spanish, Turkish, Greek
★Recommended — Portuguese National Reading Plan
★Best books for kids 2013 – Time Out London (2013)
★English translation available

With only a few exceptions, no one can answer this question with absolute certainty.
Where do we go when we disappear? takes advantage of a lack of clear-cut answers to explore some possibilities — colourful and poetic, serious or nonsensical — with which to brighten this inevitably sombre topic.
Fortunately (or unfortunately, who knows) we are not the only ones to disappear.
It happens with everything in the world.
Sun, clouds, leaves and even holidays
are always starting and ending,
appearing and disappearing.
What does this book suggest?
That we observe the world and seek new possibilities for it (ones that will serve us and those we love).
Important: in this exploration, no detail should be overlooked – from socks which mysteriously disappear, to the sun which abandons us each day, each of these elements presents some interesting ideas to help us fill the space that opens up around this great question.
“Where do we go when we disappear?” subtly approaches the matter of absence, departure and death. Without providing definitive answers, it opens up a route for the imagination, making this weighty subject a little lighter (even if only for some brief moments).

Isabel Minhós Martins
Isabel was born in Lisbon in 1974.
When she was a child, she wanted to be a journalist, an archaeologist or a pediatrician. She didn’t end up being any of those things, but she does love what she does.
“For me, writing is like digging: you always find something – sometimes worms, sometimes water, sometimes stones, roots, tunnels… a lost shoe.
I like writing because I almost always find something unexpected. And I like reading for the same reason: someone dug and dug and dug and found something that then they show us in words”.
She studied at the Lisbon College of Fine Arts, before working as a creative in children’s communication. Later, together with a group of friends, she founded the publisher Planeta Tangerina.
A number of her books have won prizes or been distinguished by institutions connected to the world of children’s books: White Ravens Catalogue, Andersen Prize, Banco del Libro, Portuguese Society of Authors (2015), Gustav-Heinemann Friedenspreis (2017), Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis (2017). She received nominations to the ALMA – Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award in 2022 and 2023.
Many of her books have been published in other countries all over the world (France, Brazil, Korea, United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, Holland…).

Madalena Matoso
Madalena was born in Lisbon, in 1974. She is an illustrator. She graduated in Communication Design at the University of Lisbon’s Faculty of Fine Arts and later specialised in graphic design at the University of Barcelona.
In 1999, Madalena founded Planeta Tangerina together with three friends. Planeta Tangerina started out as a content, illustration and graphic design studio, and later in 2004 debuted as a publisher. From the beginning, their books have always wanted to explore new territories, question and challenge readers and be free.
Madalena has illustrated several books, such as When I was Born, With Time, Clap Book, Little Andersen’s Dictionary, Where Do We Go When We Disappear? and Inside – A Guide to Exploring The Brain.
She has won the Portuguese National Illustration Awards twice (2008 and 2018) and received several honourable mentions (2006, 2007, 2009 and 2014); and also the Children’s Illustration prize at the comics festival Amadora BD (2008 and 2011). In 2018, the illustrations from her book It’s Not That Hard were selected for the illustration exhibition at the Bologna Children’s Books Fair. The same book also received an honourable mention in the category “Children’s Picture Books” at the New York Book Fair. Her book Mountains has received an honourable mention from the jury in the category of Art, Architecture and Design (Bologna Ragazzi Awards, 2018). The book What’s It For? received an honourable mention from the jury in the category of Non Fiction (Bologna Ragazzi Awards, 2022).