The Little Match Girl

"The Little Match Girl" is the most poignant of the stories told by H.C. Andersen. It is about a small, poor orphan girl forced to sell matches to passersby on the street. On the last day of the old year,... the girl fails to sell a single match; not a penny was given to her all day, and the little one does not dare to return home to the cold room in the attic where her father will surely beat her. Undressed and barefoot, she sits on the snow at the edge of a house and begins to light the unsold matches one by one. In the flickering flames, the girl sees beautiful images that have never been in her life: a warm oven, a festive table with a Christmas goose, a luxurious Christmas tree with thousands of candles... With these imagined images, the girl ascends to Heaven — "to where there is neither cold, nor hunger, nor fear"...
The artist Lyudmila Pipchenko, who created illustrations specifically for this edition, managed to convey this heart-wrenching New Year's story. Tears of compassion well up in your throat as soon as you open the book...