Sandman's Tall Tales
101 stories. Not your usual bedtime stories.
Une-Mati, the Estonian Sandman, doesn't lull children to sleep with gentle tales. He tells them outrageous nonsense: a nail with a big dream, a pickpocket and a bag boy, a Sandman who sells his own grandfather. Children laugh and parents laugh along, and somewhere in the middle there is always a small truth.
Humour is the point
Bedtime stories are usually soft and sleepy. Sandman's tales are the opposite: tall tales, absurd twists and wordplay that make the evening story the best part of the day. That is what sets the series apart from other bedtime books. Ages 4 to 104.
Inside the stories
A museum of lost things lives under the bed
Shadows on the wall turn out to be actors with stage fright
A spider doesn't want to eat anyone, it just wants to sleep
A comma takes offence and blasts off into space
A coffee machine declares itself king
A post office in the forest keeps the letters nobody sent
Meet the characters
Meet the characters
Une-Mati – the Sandman himself. A little cracked, as he admits, "since birth".
Madli – the little girl who could never fall asleep, and the first to hear his tales.
Aaron – Madli's nephew, a boy with exactly the same trouble, years later.
Karla – a mischievous kratt who steals dreams and asks whether everything really has to be nice.
Kriipi – a tiny closet monster, more scared than scary.
One series, 101 stories, any collection
The stories were published in Estonian in eleven volumes. Each story stands on its own, so a publisher can take the original volumes or compose new collections of any size, for example five books of 20 stories and a sixth of 21, or a best-of.
