Stan and Nan

Sometimes, the simplest stories are the best... This is a lovely, tender book... Stan and Nan are all of our grandparents, their stability and infinite kindness much mourned as our ever-changing worlds spin frantically on.' 
Rachel Cooke, Observer

Lippett serves up a little slice of social history, and it’s this that makes her book so rich and touching… This is a lovely, tender book… Her story brims with love.

Both an intricate piece of superbly executed and charming illustration work and an exploration of ideas around shared memory and storytelling.

A tale of grandparents and northern families that made me weep for all the right reasons… I bloody loved Stan and Nan. It made me smile, it made me cry (happy and sad tears), it made me think and remember. It just did all those wonderful things that the best books can... So if you can get your mitts on it, it is a real joy to spend your time with, I will be reading it again and again.

Sarah Lippett is a London-based artist and author. Her first graphic novel, Stan and Nan, was awarded the Quentin Blake prize for best narrative at the Royal College of Art and was published by Jonathan Cape in 2016, becoming an Observer book of the year. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, and Time Out. When she’s not drawing or writing, she plays bass in the band Fever Dream.

Sometimes, the simplest stories are the best... This is a lovely, tender book... Stan and Nan are all of our grandparents, their stability and infinite kindness much mourned as our ever-changing worlds spin frantically on.' 
Rachel Cooke, Observer 
 
My nan wrote me many letters back in 2011. They were about the love of her life, my grandad, Stanley Burndred. I’ve never met him, he died long before I was born, but his drawings, paintings and ceramics have been in my life for as long as I can remember. Every wall of Nan’s house would be decorated by his artworks and every windowsill bore his ceramic creations. Whenever we visited Nan in the Black Country I would study the ornaments and pictures, wondering who had made them. It wasn’t until I wrote to Nan many years later, receiving in return beautiful handwritten letters detailing his life, that it became apparent that the work was his. 
 
The letters were so beautiful I felt my nan’s story had to be told. Stan and Nan is the story of an ordinary couple and the people who loved them. The narrative follows their lives from Stan’s working-class background, to his premature death, through to Nan’s struggle to cope, and the perils of ageing. It is a memoir about the importance of family, and about death, love, living and human connection.

Sarah Lippett

If this doesn’t make you cry, you may be a robot rather than a human being… But there is joy here, too, and not only in [Lippett’s] wonderful illustrations. As those who loved her first book, Stan and Nan, will know, she is so deft when it comes to the details of time, place and family life… She can also be very droll… [A Puff of Smoke] is deeply affecting – and not a little chastening, too.

The panels grab you in an emotional, immediate way. There’s no polish, just pure feeling… it is a credit to Lippett’s creation that you want more of it. Intimate and deeply personal, with a healthy dose of humour thrown in, A Puff Of Smoke is a moving account of a childhood marked by love, pain and confusion. Vital reading for anyone who’s had their own tumultuous path towards getting an all-important diagnosis.

A Puff Of Smoke – all scratchy lines and splashy colour – is a journey from innocence to experience, and from hospital ward to hospital ward... One more thing. It's very funny.

A moving, often very funny graphic memoir about what it is like to grow up with an illness that no one can diagnose. 
 
 When the headaches started, Sarah Lippett would stand alone on a different side of the playground from the other children. When she started to drag one of her legs, her parents took her to hospital, and so began the visits to many different doctors, each one more bewildered by her illness than the last. Initially schooled at home, when Sarah went back to school she was placed with the struggling kids, and still so often ill, she felt even more alone. 
 
But although Sarah's parents often despaired of the stream of appointments and no cure, they never showed it and she grew up in the midst of a boisterous, loving family and found good friends at last, as well as venturing into bands, art, boys, books and records. Finally, when Sarah turned sixteen, she was admitted to Great Ormond Street Hospital where the doctors diagnosed her with the rare disease, Moyamoya. The book ends with Sarah waking up after brain surgery.

Sarah Lippett

Praise for A Puff of Smoke

If this doesn’t make you cry, you may be a robot rather than a human being… But there is joy here, too, and not only in [Lippett’s] wonderful illustrations. As those who loved her first book,

The panels grab you in an emotional, immediate way. There’s no polish, just pure feeling… it is a credit to Lippett’s creation that you want more of it. Intimate and deeply personal, with a healthy dos ...

A Puff Of Smoke – all scratchy lines and splashy colour – is a journey from innocence to experience, and from hospital ward to hospital ward... One more thing. It's very funny.

If this doesn’t make you cry, you may be a robot rather than a human being… But there is joy here, too, and not only in [Lippett’s] wonderful illustrations. As those who loved her first book,

The panels grab you in an emotional, immediate way. There’s no polish, just pure feeling… it is a credit to Lippett’s creation that you want more of it. Intimate and deeply personal, with a healthy dos ...

A Puff Of Smoke – all scratchy lines and splashy colour – is a journey from innocence to experience, and from hospital ward to hospital ward... One more thing. It's very funny.

If this doesn’t make you cry, you may be a robot rather than a human being… But there is joy here, too, and not only in [Lippett’s] wonderful illustrations. As those who loved her first book,

The panels grab you in an emotional, immediate way. There’s no polish, just pure feeling… it is a credit to Lippett’s creation that you want more of it. Intimate and deeply personal, with a healthy dos ...

A Puff Of Smoke – all scratchy lines and splashy colour – is a journey from innocence to experience, and from hospital ward to hospital ward... One more thing. It's very funny.

Books by Sarah Lippett

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