My Brother's Book by Maurice Sendak: review Maurice Sendak died in May last year aged 83 and left a legacy of hauntingly beautiful children's books: In the Night Kitchen, Nutshell Library and Where the Wild Things Are, which is half a century old this year, among them. His final posthumous tale, My Brother's Book, is ostensibly an elegy for Sendak's older brother Jack, who died in 1995. A new star blasts into Earth, separating two brothers, Guy and Jack, and throwing them out of paradise. Jack is catapulted "to continents of ice." He is "a snow image stuck fast in water like stone./His poor nose froze." The book sparkles with tributes to people who influenced Sendak. In 12 illustrated spreads, you feel the effect Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale - a play Sendak wept throughout when taken to see for the first time - had on his imagination. The lyricism of Emily Dickinson is discernible, and many of the dreamlike illustrations, all with subtle grey borders, owe much to William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Sendak said in 2006: "When my brother Jack died, I wanted to do something extraordinary for him. Five years later, I had an idea. The poem I wrote was very dark. I hope to finish it. Well, finish it he did and although it is dark, it is no more so than the disorientating and fear-filled place that Sendak usually conjured. The line in My Brother's Book that seems key is spoken by Guy about his lost brother: A sad riddle is best for me. The hardback edition is elegant but it's not cheap (£18.99) and seems to reinforce Sendak's statement that he never really wrote for children, and certainly never to make them happy. If anything, this beguiling tale is a moral fable for melancholy adults. Maurice Sendak: My Brother's Book (Harper Collins, £18.99)