Pick of the picture books

From the publisher that brought you the Manga Shakespeare series and other illustrated classics, this latest artistic translation of a great 20th-century novel is no less ambitious: Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, adapted and illustrated by Andrzej Klimowski and Danusia Schejbal (Eye Classics, 16.99). Klimowski, a poster designer, book illustrator and professor at the RCA, has been lavishly praised by Harold Pinter, among others. Here, his brooding, black ink chiaroscuro contrasts with the colourful, faux-naive gouache of Schejbal to create a fantastical journey. Something may be lost in translation there's an argument that a conjuring devil and his big black cat should stay in the reader's imagination but this is an intriguing mix of the sinister and the surreal.