After the Storm

Ida-Lovisa Rudolfsson

One morning, when Sam wakes up on her lonely island in the middle of the ocean, an icy storm has just passed by. The snow still pours into her bedroom and a rope, which turns out to be enchanted, is left in the middle of the floor. When Sam tries to grab the rope, it slips away from her, enticing her to run after it, out of the little cottage and into the deep forest…

Tree trunks and branches here and there have been broken by the night’s hard winds and Sam runs, jumps, climbs and balances with the help of the rope, through the storm-ravaged forest. Eventually she reaches the beach on the other side of the island, where she makes a surprising
discovery.

Ida-Lovisa Rudolfsson is a textile artist, educated at HDK in Gothenburg. After the Storm is her debut as a picture-book maker. Stitch by stitch, she has built up a peculiar and dizzyingly beautiful picture book, about a winter storm and the time afterwards. The center of the story is Sam, a girl with an ability for imagination that gives her tiger-like powers.

“I have embroidered Sam’s story slowly, stitch by stitch. It has been like putting together a puzzle: methodical and intuitive at the same time, dreamy yet deeply rooted in real events. Events that sometimes require to be secured with double knots on inherited bed linen.”
Ida-Lovisa Rudolfsson

Press voices

“Sam’s adventure is reminiscent of two other children’s classics: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince and Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are…. But with the classic works as a jumping-off point, Rudolfsson creates something uniquely hers… After the Storm constructs a singular, enigmatic atmosphere where one can almost hear the quiet and feel the chill of the sea.” – Therese Bohman, Expressen

“After the Storm is a poetic tale of the longing for independence, but also a pure story about life and perhaps even the afterlife…. With a visual keenness and grounding in fantasy-rich, bucolic settings, Rudolfsson offers an existential narrative of impressive depth…. At the same time, Rudolfsson’s palette saturates the book with warmth and fanciful lightness.” – Alexandra Sundqvist, Dagens Nyheter