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Reading lists

8 of the most beautiful graphic novels

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17 mesmerising graphic novels

A German Family Album

Heimat

The German bestseller - a powerful and deeply affecting graphic memoir that explores identity, guilt and the meaning of home 
 
Winner of Moira Gemmill Illustrator of the Year 
Winner of Book Illustration prize at the V&amp;A Illustration Awards 
Winner of the The National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography 
Winner of the Lynd Ward Graphic Novel Prize 
Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing 
Shortlisted for the Longman History Today Prize 
 
One of the Guardian's '50 Biggest Books of Autumn 2018' 
The New York Times Critics' Top Books of 2018 
 
Nora Krug grew up as a second-generation German after the end of the Second World War, struggling with a profound ambivalence towards her country's recent past. Travelling as a teenager, her accent alone evoked raw emotions in the people she met, an anger she understood, and shared. 
 
Seventeen years after leaving Germany for the US, Nora Krug decided she couldn't know who she was without confronting where she'd come from. In Heimat, she documents her journey investigating the lives of her family members under the Nazi regime, visually charting her way back to a country still tainted by war. Beautifully illustrated and lyrically told, Heimat is a powerful meditation on the search for cultural identity, and the meaning of history and home.

Krug's new visual memoir is a mazy and ingenious reckoning with the past . . . She is a tenacious investigator, ferreting out stories from the wispiest hints - a rumor or a mysterious photograph.

Extraordinary . . . The curious appeal of Krug's graphic memoir is that it never fully loses itself in the act of storytelling but constantly stops to turn over and reassess the means at its disposal.

Bracing honesty ... the informal feel and arresting candor of a diary

Anne-Dore Krohn, literary critic at RBB Kulturradio

As Krug wrestles on the page with the evasions and hard truths she encounters, and uses her illustrations to imagine difficult historical scenarios, she distils pain, hurt, confusion, empathy and ultimately peace into a powerful visual narrative.

A spectacular debut . . . enormously clever

A highly original and powerful graphic novel that works on many levels...an unflinching examination of what we mean when we think of identity, of history and home. The result is a book that is as informative as a history and as touching as a novel.

[Krug] is a tenacious investigator, ferreting out stories from the wispiest hints - a rumor or a mysterious photograph. . . . What Krug pursues is a better quality of guilt, a way of confronting the past without paralysis.

I was hugely taken by Nora Krug's Heimat, a beautifully produced and thoughtful piece of family history by a second generation German immigrant to the US.

Krug probes her family's actions in Nazi Germany, conducting interviews and roaming archives and flea markets. She confronts past and present in a book that's been praised for its invention and bravery.

The Guardian, 'The 50 biggest books of autumn 2018'

An amazing look into the erasure of her grandparents generation and their involvement in Nazi Germany . . . the reader really feels Krug's fear and the tension that builds as she must will herself to peel back the layers of history, and unearth a truth that she might not be ready for.

Heimat is an astoundingly honest book that conducts a devastating - and irresistible - investigation into one family's struggle with the forces of history. I could not stop reading it and when I was done I could not stop thinking about it. By going so deeply into her family's history, Krug has in some ways written about us all

A page-turning scrapbook/collage of memory, meaning and accountability, Ms. Krug draws the reader through her family history with the directness of imagery, handwriting and, ultimately, a disquieting direness that has echoes in our American life, right now. Heimat is valuable, readable and, needless to say, highly recommended

Heimat is a compelling and beautifully crafted graphic memoir. Holding this book, and leafing through its pages, rich with photographs, handwritten letters and exquisite drawings, you feel as if if the past is reaching out and grabbing you. It is an exploration of legacy and memory, the things we inherit, the stories we pass on and the strange power the past can hold over us. I loved it

author of The Encyclopedia of Early Earth

Nora Krug created something completely new by inventing a new medium. (...) And with every new form of visual representation she uses, she is able to gain a new perspective on herself and on her history.

Ijoma Mangold, literary critic at Die Zeit

Nora Krug has created a beautiful visual memoir of a horrific time in history. A time that torments us to this day. Asking questions and searching for the truth, she will not turn away from the legacy of her family and her country. She asks the question of how any of us survive our family history. Ultimately, the only course is not to veil the answers

Maira Kalman, American illustrator, artist and writer

To belong to a place is not to be able to choose what it takes from you. But we can choose what we take from it. Nora Krug takes from her German homeland, and then gives to us, a sense of what it is like to be German today, and a guide to how a reckoning with the past can begin

As the Jewish heir of grandparents who themselves had to flee the upsurge of fascism in their German homelands, I found granddaughter Nora Krug's heartrending investigation of her own family's painstakingly occluded history through those years especially moving. But as an American living through these, our very own years of a seemingly inexorable drift into one's still not quite sure what, I found Krug's achingly realized graphic memoir downright unsettling, for what will our own grandchildren one day make of us and our own everyday compromises and failures to attend?

author of Calamities of Exile and A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers

Nora Krug's book Heimat is a heart-wrenching, suspenseful and fascinating odyssey that straddles, and seeks to uncover, an uncharted, inaccessible, unfathomable past. It is a kaleidoscope of interrupted lives, leading inexorably to its ultimate conclusion. I couldn't stop reading it

Hava Beller, Director of 'The Restless Conscience'

Nora Krug is a German-American author, illustrator and associate professor in the Illustration Program at the Parsons School of Design in New York City. Her drawings and visual narratives have appeared in publications including The New York Times, the Guardian and le Monde Diplomatique, and in a number of anthologies. A recipient of numerous prestigious fellowships, her books are included in the Library of Congress and the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University. Her illustrations have been recognized with three gold medals from the Society of Illustrators and a Silver Cube from the New York Art Directors Club. Krug's work has been exhibited internationally, and her animations shown at the Sundance Film Festival.

Nora Krug grew up as a second-generation German after the end of the Second World War, struggling with a profound ambivalence towards her country's recent past. Travelling as a teenager, her accent alone evoked raw emotions in the people she met, an anger she understood, and shared. 
 
Seventeen years after leaving Germany for the US, Nora Krug decided she couldn't know who she was without confronting where she'd come from. In Heimat, she documents her journey investigating the lives of her family members under the Nazi regime, visually charting her way back to a country still tainted by war. Beautifully illustrated and lyrically told, Heimat is a powerful meditation on the search for cultural identity, and the meaning of history and home.

Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

On Tyranny Graphic Edition

A captivating graphic edition of Timothy Snyder's bestselling book of lessons for surviving and resisting the arc toward authoritarianism. 
 
 Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny is one of the essential books of recent years, using the darkest moments in twentieth-century history to teach twenty lessons on resisting modern-day authoritarianism. These include a warning to be aware of how symbols used today could affect tomorrow, an urgent reminder to research everything for yourself and to the fullest extent, and an encouragement to use personalised and individualised speech rather than clichéd phrases when arguing a point 
 
 In this graphic edition, Nora Krug draws from her highly inventive style in Heimat - at once a graphic memoir, collage-style scrapbook, historical narrative and trove of memories - to breathe new life, colour and power into Snyder's modern classic, turning a quick-read pocket guide of lessons into a visually striking rumination and call for action. 
 
 'On Tyranny is a must read, a clear-eyed guidebook' Ken Burns 
 
 History does not repeat, but it does instruct. In a time of great uncertainty and instability, this edition of On Tyranny emphasises the importance of being active, conscious, and deliberate participants in resistance.

Vastly important, deeply affecting, powerful, magnificent

Philippe Sands, author of East West Street and The Ratline

A more concise, profound, or essential book on the subject does not exist

J.J. Abrams, filmmaker, Star Trek and Star Wars: The Force Awakens

On Tyranny is a must read, a clear-eyed guidebook... a manual for how to protect and preserve Democracy

Nora Krug has visualized and rendered some of the most valuable lessons of the 20th century

Her colorful images here - some drawn and some collaged, including many historical photos and artifacts - add a new layer of complexity, and make the search for understanding in images of the past part of the story

One of the most important books of our time... This book should be read and experienced by everyone, its lessons carved into our hearts

Nate Powell, graphic novelist, March and Save It for Later

Krug's illustrated edition of On Tyranny is more than an instant classic. It is an act of resistance - and a gift of love

Joshua Oppenheimer, filmmaker, The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence

A chilling description of how authoritarian mindsets work

Timothy Snyder (Author) 
 Timothy Snyder is Levin Professor of History at Yale University and the author of fifteen critically acclaimed books including The Road to Unfreedom and most recently On Tyranny which was an international bestseller. 
 
His previous books include Black Earth, which was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and won the annual prize of the Dutch Auschwitz Committee; and Bloodlands, which won the Hannah Arendt Prize, the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award in the Humanities and the literature award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. 
 
He lives in New Haven, Connecticut. 
 
Nora Krug (Illustrator) 
 Nora Krug is a German-American author, illustrator and associate professor in the Illustration Program at the Parsons School of Design in New York City. Her drawings and visual narratives have appeared in publications including The New York Times, the Guardian and le Monde Diplomatique, and in a number of anthologies. A recipient of numerous prestigious fellowships, her books are included in the Library of Congress and the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University. Her illustrations have been recognized with three gold medals from the Society of Illustrators and a Silver Cube from the New York Art Directors Club. Krug's work has been exhibited internationally, and her animations shown at the Sundance Film Festival.

A captivating graphic edition of Timothy Snyder's bestselling book of lessons for surviving and resisting the arc toward authoritarianism. 
 
 Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny is one of the essential books of recent years, using the darkest moments in twentieth-century history to teach twenty lessons on resisting modern-day authoritarianism. These include a warning to be aware of how symbols used today could affect tomorrow, an urgent reminder to research everything for yourself and to the fullest extent, and an encouragement to use personalised and individualised speech rather than clichéd phrases when arguing a point 
 
 In this graphic edition, Nora Krug draws from her highly inventive style in Heimat - at once a graphic memoir, collage-style scrapbook, historical narrative and trove of memories - to breathe new life, colour and power into Snyder's modern classic, turning a quick-read pocket guide of lessons into a visually striking rumination and call for action. 
 
History does not repeat, but it does instruct. In a time of great uncertainty and instability, this edition of On Tyranny emphasises the importance of being active, conscious, and deliberate participants in resistance.

Nora Krug

Diaries of War is a magnificent feat of witness. Nora Krug&rsquo;s illustrated weekly interviews with a Ukrainian journalist and a Russian artist are so much more raw and intimate than a conventional news account, conveying the texture of daily life in wartime as well as the smaller tragedies that often don&rsquo;t make the headlines. Instead of watching from a serene distance, you&rsquo;re engaging with K. and D. Your guard is down. The anguish and shock has gotten in. Read this remarkable book and grant them that act of solidarity

This book will definitely make you think. The geography of Russian aggression is much wider than you might at first imagine. Russian aggression is not only bombs, rockets and millions of refugees. It is also a boomerang that hits the aggressor country itself in the most unexpected way. Nora Krug’s dual visualtextual narrative can emotionally drain the reader, but the reader is unlikely to ever forget this book

Powerful graphic journalism that highlights the contrasting realities of a Ukrainian journalist and a Russian artist grappling with their own individual experiences of Russia’s war on Ukraine – collected, edited, and illustrated by award-winning author Nora Krug ... Krug approaches Diaries of War with the immense skill and thoughtfulness required to document these two complicated experiences for the purpose of encouraging critical thinking ... Diaries of War is a harrowing real-time record of an international conflict that continues to devastate countless lives

As fascist imperialism - with Vladimir Putin as its rotting figurehead - commands attention on the world stage, those living underfoot must survive. Here are the personal accounts of two such survivors, living on either side of the Russo-Ukrainian War, illustrated with poetic grace by Nora Krug. A vital and empathetic document of human experience in terrible times

Nora Krug leads us through the first dark year of the war, in search for the roots of violence. Her collage of two unusual and contrasting diaries - one Ukrainian and one Russian - that are presented in parallel and combined with her intrinsic minimalist illustrations, creates a document that enlightens and shocks in equal measure

Nora Krug does an extraordinary work combining painful and complex storytelling with an unusual grace and elegance. She manages to involve us in looking at history from an intimate and very human point of view. There is tact, decency and wonder in her books

If we did not know it before, Covid-19 has taught us that headlines and op-eds are insufficient to convey the grinding reality of an ongoing traumatic event. While our mass media engages in a sustained effort to forget, Nora Krug here reminds us. Illustrated by Krug&rsquo;s gem-like miniatures, these dual accounts from Ukraine and Russia, rooted on either side of that deadly border, each express their own sustained senses of horror and anxiety during the first year of Russia&rsquo;s ongoing war on Ukraine. Russian artist D&rsquo;s total alienation from the shocking acts of his own government will resonate with Americans for whom the Trump administration was only the most recent and egregious example of same. And under any President, we should seek voices like that of Ukrainian journalist K &mdash; testimony of those who have suffered under our own government&rsquo;s consistently violent foreign policy. May this book be a model for many others to follow

Growing up as a Jew in Nazi-occupied Hungary, being a victim of war was a fact of life. Diaries of War touches me very personally

Two Visual Accounts from Ukraine and Russia

Immediately following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Nora Krug connected with two anonymous subjects - 'K.', a Ukrainian journalist, and 'D.', a Russian artist - and began what would become a year of correspondence. Deeply moved by the rawness of their responses, she felt that through the personal accounts of these individuals who, directly and indirectly, experienced the war firsthand, she might be able to communicate something of the war and its human impact. Over the course of the next twelve months she communicated with each of them individually via phone chat, condensing their sometimes fluid, sometimes fragmentary answers into a consistent narrative and then created illustrations to go with each entry. The personal accounts contained in this book chronicle the first year of Russia's invasion of Ukraine in an intimate, epistolary format. 
 
Diaries of War explores the personal, the political, conflict, family and daily life under war with immense skill, compassion and moving thoughtfulness. Through these two individuals we see the granular effects of war on two lives, but they are emblematic of millions. Diaries of War is a harrowing record of a heart-wrenching historical event that has devastated the world and continues to alter countless lives.

Nora Krug

Praise for Diaries of War

Diaries of War is a magnificent feat of witness. Nora Krug’s illustrated weekly interviews with a Ukrainian journalist and a Russian artist are so much more raw and intimate than a conventional news acc ...

This book will definitely make you think. The geography of Russian aggression is much wider than you might at first imagine. Russian aggression is not only bombs, rockets and millions of refugees. It is also a boome ...

Powerful graphic journalism that highlights the contrasting realities of a Ukrainian journalist and a Russian artist grappling with their own individual experiences of Russia’s war on Ukraine – collected, edited, an ...

Diaries of War is a magnificent feat of witness. Nora Krug’s illustrated weekly interviews with a Ukrainian journalist and a Russian artist are so much more raw and intimate than a conventional news acc ...

This book will definitely make you think. The geography of Russian aggression is much wider than you might at first imagine. Russian aggression is not only bombs, rockets and millions of refugees. It is also a boome ...

Powerful graphic journalism that highlights the contrasting realities of a Ukrainian journalist and a Russian artist grappling with their own individual experiences of Russia’s war on Ukraine – collected, edited, an ...

Diaries of War is a magnificent feat of witness. Nora Krug’s illustrated weekly interviews with a Ukrainian journalist and a Russian artist are so much more raw and intimate than a conventional news acc ...

This book will definitely make you think. The geography of Russian aggression is much wider than you might at first imagine. Russian aggression is not only bombs, rockets and millions of refugees. It is also a boome ...

Powerful graphic journalism that highlights the contrasting realities of a Ukrainian journalist and a Russian artist grappling with their own individual experiences of Russia’s war on Ukraine – collected, edited, an ...

Books by Nora Krug

Articles featuring Nora Krug

8 of the most beautiful graphic novels

17 mesmerising graphic novels

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