Steve Roud was Local Studies Librarian for the London Borough of Croydon and served as Honorary Librarian of the Folklore Society for over fifteen years. He has been researching British folklore for over thirty years and is the joint author of the Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore, plus other books on traditional drama and folk song, and the Penguin Guide to the Superstitions of Britain and Ireland, which won the Katharine Briggs Folklore Award in 2004. His publications include London Lore (2008) and The Lore of the Playground (2010). He also compiles the Folk Song Index and the Broadside Index, two internationally acclaimed computer databases of traditional folk and popular song. He lives in Sussex.

Steve Roud

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Raymond Briggs

A marvellous, life-enhancing book for all ages, now a major animated film starring Jim Broadbent, Brenda Blethyn and Luke Treadaway 
 
Utterly original, deeply moving and very funny, Ethel &amp; Ernest tells the story of Raymond Briggs' parents' marriage, lady's maid Ethel and milkman Ernest, from their first chance encounter in 1928, through the birth of their son Raymond in 1934, to their deaths, within months of each other, in 1971. 
 
Told in Brigg`s unique strip-cartoon format, Ethel and Ernest live through the defining moments of the twentieth century: the darkness of the Great Depression, the build up to World War II, the trials of the war years, the euphoria of VE Day and the emergence of a generation from post war austerity to the cultural enlightenment of the 1960s. 
 
Ethel &amp; Ernest is a heartfelt and affectionate tribute to an ordinary couple and an extraordinary generation.

Ethel & Ernest

Andrew Barrow

'Your brother looked healthy, happy, natural. But everything else about him is extremely odd. Not faintly odd. Extremely odd. Except in appearance. He's the opposite of you.' Quentin Crisp 
 
At the age of twenty-two, the youngest of five brothers, Jonathan Barrow, was killed with his fiancée in a car crash. He left behind the manuscript of a novel, The Queue, in which, among other things, he prophesied his own death. The story of a boy and a dachshund, populated by a kaleidoscopic menagerie of people and animals and an array of anthropomorphic in-betweens, The Queue is a vivid and irreverent portrayal of the world in which Jonathan and his awe-struck older brother Andrew were raised. 
 
Jonathan and his book form the framework of a remarkable study of a young man's inner and outer effervescence, his family, England and high and low society in the Swinging Sixties. Filled with fascinating and fantastical anecdotes, Animal Magic documents a heady and peripatetic childhood in Lancashire, the Lake District and Wiltshire, misadventures at home and school, and the early working life of the two brothers, on the lower rungs of show business, backstage at Claridge's, and finally in advertising. This spellbinding elegy negotiates love affairs, family tensions, exhibitions, publishers' rejections and precarious living in a flat in Tite Street, Chelsea. 
 
Punctuated with excerpts from The Queue and Jonathan's other bizarre and brilliant writings, Animal Magic is a book bursting with humour, wit and pathos and featuring an outlandish cast of characters, from an eccentric father, a mischievous family dog and a down-and-out ex-schoolmaster to curious stars of Swinging London like Mick Jagger and Tommy Cooper. It is a memoir unlike any other.

Animal Magic

A Brother's Story

Jeanette Winterson

I can change the story because I am the story. 
 
With her execution looming, a woman is fighting for her life. Every night she tells a story. Every morning, she lives one more day. One Aladdin Two Lamps cracks open the legendary story of Shahrazad in One Thousand and One Nights to reveal new questions and answers we are still thinking about today. Who should we trust? Is love the most important thing in the world? Does it matter whether you are honest? What makes us happy? 
 
In her guise as Aladdin – the orphan who changes his world – Jeanette Winterson asks us to reread what we think we know and look again at how fiction works in our lives, giving us the courage to change our own narratives and alter endings we wish to subvert. As a young working-class woman, with no obvious future beyond factory work or marriage, Winterson realised through the power of books that she could read herself as fiction as well as fact. 
 
Weaving together fiction, magic and memoir, this remarkable book is a tribute to the age-old tradition of storytelling and a radical step into the future – an invitation to look more closely at our own stories, and to imagine the world anew.

One Aladdin Two Lamps

In his customary pose as the grumpiest of grumpy old men, Raymond Briggs contemplates old age and death… and doesn’t like them much. 
 
Illustrated with Briggs’s inimitable pencil drawings, Time for Lights Out is a collection of short pieces, some funny, some melancholy, some remembering his wife who died young, others about the joy of grandchildren, of walking the dog… He looks back at his schooldays and his time as an evacuee during the war, and remembers his parents and the house in which he grew up. But most, like this one, are about his home in Sussex: 
 
Looking round this house, 
What will they say, 
The future ghosts? 
 
There must have been 
Some barmy old bloke here, 
Long-haired, artsy-fartsy type, 
Did pictures for kiddy books 
Or some such tripe. 
 
You should have seen the stuff 
He stuck up in that attic! 
Snowman this and snowman that, 
Tons and tons of tat.

Time For Lights Out

Darrin Bell

***LONGLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL*** 
***A GUARDIAN GRAPHIC NOVEL OF THE YEAR 2023*** 
 
Darrin Bell was six years old when his mother told him he couldn't have a realistic water gun. She said that police think little Black boys older and less innocent than they are. So began 'The Talk'... 
 
'The Ta-Nehisi Coates of comics' 
GARRY TRUDEAU, creator of Doonesbury 
 
'Darrin Bell has produced another American classic' 
GUARDIAN 
 
Through evocative illustrations and sharp humour, Darrin Bell examines how The Talk all Black parents must have with their children shaped his intimate and public moments from childhood to adulthood. While coming of age in Los Angeles - and finding a voice through cartooning - Bell becomes painfully aware of being regarded as dangerous by white teachers, neighbours and police officers, and thus of his mortality. Drawing attention to the brutal murders of African Americans, and showcasing revealing insights and cartoons along the way, he brings us up to the moment of reckoning when people took to the streets protesting the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. 
 
And now Bell must decide whether he and his own six-year-old son are ready to have The Talk.

The Talk

Sarah Lippett

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.

A Puff of Smoke

Marjane Satrapi

From the bestselling author of Persepolis comes this humorous and enlightening look at the sex lives of Iranian women. Embroideries gathers together Marjane's tough-talking grandmother, stoic mother, glamorous and eccentric aunt and their friends and neighbours for an afternoon of tea-drinking and talk. Naturally, the subject turns to loves, sex and vagaries of men...

Embroideries

Astrid Goldsmith

'Rich, moving and wryly funny... a delight' Observer *Graphic Novel of the Month* 
 
'Brilliant, witty and endlessly inventive' Joe Dunthorne, author of Submarine 
 
A road-trip across Europe and back in time: the debut graphic memoir from the prize-winning author of A Funeral In Freiburg. 
 
When her imperious, chain-smoking German Jewish grandmother dies, it falls to Astrid and her father to drive a hire van to the Black Forest and collect the family heirlooms from Gisela's nicotine-stained apartment. 
 
In Freiburg, they are faced with several lifetimes’ worth of belongings to sort through - infested Persian rugs, mysterious photographs, a toy monkey that started a marriage - and a grasping landlord, impatient to renovate. 
 
As the list of demands from uncles, sisters and cousins grows longer, the rabbit-holes of history and memory grow deeper. Long-buried secrets and tales of survival are revealed - from Nazi Germany to colonial Africa - and old feuds are reignited, as father and daughter struggle with the responsibility of preserving the family legacy. More importantly, will they be able to fit everything into a medium wheel-base transit van? 
 
Funny, bittersweet and beautifully drawn, The Crystal Vase is an odyssey of family arguments, identity crises, and late discoveries.

The Crystal Vase

Kate Beaton

*WINNER OF THE EISNER AWARDS FOR BEST MEMOIR AND BEST WRITER/ARTIST* 
 
'A vast and complex tapestry that captures the humanity of people... it shimmers with grace' 
ALISON BECHDEL, author of FUN HOME 
 
Before there was Kate Beaton, New York Times bestselling cartoonist of Hark A Vagrant, there was Katie Beaton of the Cape Breton Beatons, a tight-knit seaside community. After university, Katie heads out west to take advantage of Alberta's oil rush, part of the long tradition of East Coast Canadians who seek gainful employment elsewhere when they can't find it in the homeland they love so much. With the singular goal of paying off her student loans, what the journey will actually cost Katie will be far more than she anticipates. 
 
Arriving in Fort McMurray, Katie finds work in the lucrative camps owned and operated by the world's largest oil companies. As one of the few women among thousands of men, the culture shock is palpable. It does not hit home until she moves to a spartan, isolated worksite for higher pay. Katie encounters the harsh reality of life in the oil sands where trauma is an everyday occurrence yet never discussed. For young Katie, her wounds may never heal. 
 
Beaton's natural cartooning prowess is on full display as she draws colossal machinery and mammoth vehicles set against a sublime Albertan backdrop of wildlife, Northern Lights, and Rocky Mountains. Her first full length graphic narrative, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is an untold story of Canada: a country that prides itself on its egalitarian ethos and natural beauty while simultaneously exploiting both the riches of its land and the humanity of its people.

Ducks

Two Years in the Oil Sands: One of Barack Obama’s Favourite Books of 2022

David B

The most acclaimed European graphic novel of the last ten years, Epileptic is David B.'s story of his brother's battle with epilepsy - but it turns into a penetrating and sometimes lacerating self-examination on the author's part, as he delves into his own complex emotions and his family's troubled history, as well as his own youthful fantasy life. Particularly pointed is his description of the family journey from one attempted cure to another, including acupuncture, spiritualism and macrobiotics. 
 
David B.'s drawing is utterly extraordinary, balancing literal representation and expressionist psychological distortion.

Epileptic

Jon Hotten

Los Angeles, 1988. In a summer of hedonism, everyone wants their share. 
 
On Sunset Strip, undiscovered bands dream of emulating their heroes: Mötley Crüe, Van Halen, Poison and all the other chancers who got lucky... Above them in the canyons, the city’s privileged youth already live like rock stars. Drifting between these separate worlds is a journalist on the trail of stories that grow darker by the day: a rock star wannabe who may or may not be who he says he is, a guitar player who will do anything to succeed, crossing the line between reality and fantasy. 
 
Then comes beautiful Iris, distant Brenna, ambivalent Blair, Lana the singer - taking their chances, losing their way, doing whatever it takes… 
 
Set in the glory days when the music business was a vast and amoral empire where stardom seemed arbitrary and sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll were the lifestyle of choice, My Life and the Beautiful Music blurs memoir, myth and reality to recreate the last, lost era of a now-vanished world.

My Life And The Beautiful Music

Mark Doty

Mark Doty has always felt haunted by Walt Whitman’s bold, new American voice, and by his equally radical claims about body and soul and what it means to be a self. In What Is the Grass, Doty – a poet, a lover of men, a New Yorker, and an American – keeps company with Whitman and his mutable, landmark work, Leaves of Grass, tracing the resonances between his own experience and the legendary poet’s life and work. 
 
What is it, then, between us? Whitman asks. Doty’s answer is to explore spaces tied to Whitman’s life and spaces where he finds the poet’s ghost, meditating on desire, love, and the mysterious wellsprings of the poet’s enduring work. How does a voice survive death? What Is the Grass is a conversation across time and space, a study of the astonishment one poet finds in the accomplishment of another, and an attempt to grasp Whitman’s deeply hopeful vision of humanity.

What is the Grass

Joe Sacco

Sacco paved the way for Palestine with his powerful triptych on modern war and its innocent victims, originally published in his comic Yahoo and collected here: 'When Good Bombs Happen to Bad People' chronicles the effect of aerial warfare on civilians, from Germany and Japan in World War II to Libya in 1986; 'More Women, More Children, More Quickly' is written from a victim's perspective, as Sacco illustrates his mother's harrowing experiences during Italian and German WWII raids on Malta; and 'How I Loved the War', Defeatist's centrepiece, is Sacco's impassioned but sardonic reflection on the Gulf War, and the surrounding propaganda and media circus. Published during the reign of Bush I, it has since acquired an even sharper relevance. 
 
Defeatist also features Sacco's first (relatively) long-form piece, 'In the Company of Long Hair', a hilarious roadie's-eye view of an American punk band's eventful European tour from Amsterdam to Madrid, as well as 'Cartoon Genius', 'Voyage to the End of the Library', 'A Disgusting Experience', and 'On My Day Off', a cycle of funny and rueful autobiographic comics that display Sacco's graphic verve to its fullest extent. 
 
Defeatist is rounded off with a large section of Sacco's earliest, pointedly satirical strips (none of which has been collected in book form before) and new introductions and notes by the author. 
 
A combination of youthful indiscretions and mature masterworks, Notes from a Defeatist spotlights the work of a brilliant young artist as he defines the capabilities and potential of his chosen medium.

Notes From A Defeatist

In late 1995 and early 1996, cartoonist/reporter Joe Sacco travelled four times to Gorazde, a UN-designated safe area during the Bosnian War, which had teetered on the brink of obliteration for three and a half years. 
 
Still surrounded by Bosnian Serb forces, the mainly Muslim people of Gorazde had endured heavy attacks and severe privation to hang on to their town while the rest of Eastern Bosnia was brutally 'cleansed' of its non-Serb population. But as much as Safe Area Gorazde is an account of a terrible siege, it presents a snapshot of people who were slowly letting themselves believe that a war was ending and that they had survived. 
 
Since it was first published in 2000, Safe Area Gorazde has been recognized as one of the absolute classics of graphic non-fiction. We are delighted to publish it in the UK for the first time, to stand beside Joe Sacco's other books on the Cape list - Palestine, The Fixer and Notes from a Defeatist.

Safe Area Gorazde

The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992-95

James Lasdun

‘This story, with its wild human convulsions and its dense moral fibre, demands serious narrative muscle from its teller. James Lasdun has what it takes, and more: his final chapters are a masterclass in calm, hard reasoning’ Helen Garner 
 
What drives a loving family man with everything to lose to become a killer? 
 
In March of 2023, Alex Murdaugh was found guilty of murdering his wife Maggie and their younger son Paul at their home in South Carolina’s Lowcountry. The story became headline news around the world, with its outlandish revelations of corruption in high places, massive fraud, opioid abuse, fake suicides, suspicious accidents, and the generational recklessness of the wealthy legal dynasty at its center. 
 
James Lasdun explores the psychological puzzle at the heart of the story, which the murder trial failed to answer. Why did Alex Murdaugh murder his wife and son? 
 
Featuring a cast of villains ranging from supposedly respectable lawyers to violent street gang members and a gothic setting in a small town in America's deep south, The Family Man is a gripping, immersive, twisting investigation of a murder that seems to defy explanation.

The Family Man

Nick Hayes

Forged in the Dustbowl of the 1930s, in an America crippled by the Great World Recession, this humble man found solace in song, and soon those songs became the voice of the People – men and women who had seen their lives deracinated and destroyed by the vicissitudes of global economic forces beyond their control. 
 
Guthrie’s influence lives on, a touchstone for Bob Dylan, The Clash and the protest singers of the Occupy movement today. With a delighted eye, and an ear for a tune, Nick Hayes’s follow-up to the critically acclaimed Rime of the Modern Mariner brings a legend to life with a generous spirit and crackling moral force its subject would have been proud of.

Woody Guthrie

And the Dust Bowl Ballads

The Drunken Sailor traces the life of Arthur Rimbaud: poet, surrealist, libertine and gun runner. In dazzling artwork, Nick Hayes follows Rimbaud from his youth in Ardennes to the poetry salons of Paris, from the absinthe-glazed passion of his relationship with Verlaine to his flight into the jungles of Indonesia and the deserts of Yemen and Egypt. Told entirely in Rimbaud’s own words, from a new translation of Le bateau ivre, The Drunken Sailor confirms Nick Hayes’ place as one of the most talented graphic novelists at work today.

The Drunken Sailor

The Life of the Poet Arthur Rimbaud in His Own Words

Here is the fascinating and equally unforgettable sequel to Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi's memoir-in-comic strips of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. Persepolis ended on a cliffhanger in 1984, just as fourteen-year-old Marjane was leaving behind her home in Tehran, escaping fundamentalism and the war with Iraq to begin a new life in the West. 
 
Here we follow our young, intrepid heroine through the next eight years of her life: an eye-opening and sometimes lonely four years of high school in Vienna, followed by a supremely educational and heartwrenching four years back home in Iran. Just as funny and heartbreaking as its predecessor - with perhaps an even greater sense of the ridiculous inspired by life in a fundamentalist state - Persepolis 2 is also as clear-eyed and searing in its condemnation of fundamentalism and its cost to the human spirit. In its depiction of the universal trials of adolescent life and growing into adulthood - here compounded by being an outsider both abroad and at home, and by living in a state where you have no right to show your hair, wear make-up, run in public, date, or question authority - it's raw, honest, and incredibly illuminating.

Persepolis 2

Serena Katt

Serena Katt’s grandfather, whom she knew as Opa, was a ‘Sunday’s Child’, one of the lucky ones for whom everything always went right. Opa left a brief account of his childhood and teenage years, but it is opaque, a story of prizes won and boyish adventures. In Sunday’s Child, Serena Katt interrogates Opa’s version of his life. Was it really so innocent? Did he really not know what the Nazis were doing? He joined the Hitler Youth at the age of ten, swearing an oath of loyalty to the Fuhrer. From then on the games he played were actually military training, designed to produce a ‘new German youth … violent, domineering, unafraid, cruel … which the world will fear’. At seventeen, in the final desperate days of the war, he is called up but his luck holds. He is sent home and thus survives the war. 
 
Sunday’s Child marks the debut of a remarkable graphic novelist. Serena Katt’s book is powerful, eloquent and moving, and her drawing is superb.

Sunday's Child

In November 1955, Nasser Ali Khan, one of Iran's most celebrated tar players, is in search of a new instrument. His beloved tar has been broken. But no matter what tar he tries, none of them sound right. Brokenhearted, Nasser Ali Khan decides that life is no longer worth living. He takes to his bed, renouncing the world and all of its pleasures. This is the story of the eight days he spends preparing to surrender his soul. 
 
As the days pass and Nasser Ali Khan grows weaker, those who love him - his wife, his children, his siblings - gather round, incredulous, to try to comfort him. Every visitor stirs up a memory, and in the course of this week Nasser Ali Khan revisits his entire life, a life defined by three relationships in particular. He remembers his late mother, who sacrificed everything for his revolutionary brother, but who also, in the last week of her life, found solace only in smoking and listening to him play his tar; his angry wife, who can't forgive him his melancholy and irresponsibility; and Irane, his first love, whose father forbade her to marry a poor musician and inflicted the wound that fuelled his music. The pieces of Nasser Ali Khan's story slowly fall into place, and as they do, we begin to understand him. By the time the eighth day dawns, having witnessed Nasser Ali Khan communing with Sufi mystics, Sophia Loren, the spirit of his late mother, his own demons and, bravely, with Azrael, the angel of death - we feel privileged to have known him. 
 
Brilliantly weaving together the past, present and future to explore the successes and joys, failures and disappointments of Nasser Ali Khan's life and through his story, the meaning of any of our lives - Marjane Satrapi has also once again presented us with a complex and deeply human portrait of the men and women of her country, and of pre-revolution Iran itself. She delivers this tremendous story about life and death, and the fear and courage both require, with her trademark humour and insight. Chicken With Plums is Marjane Satrapi's finest achievement to date.

Chicken With Plums

Helen Longstreth

Move away, run away, wash up on a strange shore and the room is the same. It will always be the same room... The same problems in a new arrangement. 
 
Funny, sorrowful and filled with love and life, this beautiful and beguiling memoir goes in search of what we keep behind the doors of the past, how it haunts the present and what it takes to make sense of it all. 
 
Helen Longstreth’s chaotic childhood: the relentless cycle of her father’s alcoholic relapses, the six kids coming and going, the abject apologies and uncertain forgiveness, the meals that bring the family back together again. But while she is studying in America, the land of her parents’ birth, her father dies – and it all comes to an abrupt end. 
 
In the years that follow, she is drawn back to America and another world of chaotic love and alcoholic madness, dying fathers and lost boys. The same problems in a new arrangement. 
 
Ten years after her father’s death, Helen returns to her childhood home to spend a rainy summer with her mother, whose own gift for narrative is a complicated inheritance. Her father’s office, his briefcase, and his desk – all untouched since his death – loom beneath the leaking roof. At last, she begins to open the drawers…

Things in Every Room

Lucie Arnoux

A funny, heartfelt graphic memoir about living in foreign countries, and finding one's place both at home and abroad. 
 
In this delightful graphic novel, Lucie Arnoux chronicles her adventures around the world. Growing up in Marseille as a misfit with a passion for drawing, she decides to settle in London to pursue her dream career as a comics writer. Je Ne Sais Quoi shows us London through the eyes of a mischievous and clear-sighted young French woman, the joys and pains of being an outsider and, ultimately, how to live life to its fullest.

Je Ne Sais Quoi

The Adventures of a French Woman in London

Miriam Gold

This is the story of the ordinary extraordinary life of Dr Elena Zadik. 
 
Lives were bent in the furnaces of the twentieth century, but Elena Zadik was unbroken. With a stethoscope, a jar of herring and a hearing aid occasionally switched on, she forged an extraordinary life. Elena ran through the twentieth century without looking back. 
 
A refugee twice before she was 17, she broke glass ceilings to become a doctor during World War 2. She was as brilliant a doctor as she was terrible a driver (she never took a test). Finding community, falling in love and starting a family in Sheffield while her parents were imprisoned and killed in Auschwitz, she swam against the odds with courage and tenacity. 
 
Miriam gathers the threads of her Granny’s story, reflecting on their unconventional relationship and how trauma travels down through the generations in this gorgeous brocade of illustration and collage. 
 
Granny was an unintentionally hilarious woman, often difficult, always opinionated and deeply resourceful. Her hands were always busy and form the heart of this timely, irresistible graphic story of the ordinary extraordinary resilience of women. 
 
A heartfelt and charming graphic memoir of love, family and fearless women.

Elena: A Hand Made Life

Alison Bechdel

An expansive, moving and captivating graphic memoir from the author of Fun Home. 
 
Alison Bechdel's Fun Home was a literary phenomenon. While Fun Home explored Bechdel's relationship with her father, a closeted homosexual, this memoir is about her mother - a voracious reader, a music lover, a passionate amateur actor. Also a woman, unhappily married to a gay man, whose artistic aspirations simmered under the surface of Bechdel's childhood... and who stopped touching or kissing her daughter goodnight, for ever, when she was seven. 
 
Poignantly, hilariously, Bechdel embarks on a quest for answers concerning the mother-daughter gulf. 
 
'As absorbing as it is graced with a deceptive lightness of touch, it is clever, brilliantly pieced together, and utterly unusual. Sunday Times 
 
'It's a beautiful (and beautifully illustrated) look at the complexity and dysfunctionality of family through a unique lens - and frames things in such a way that you can't help but re-examine your own relationships, too.' Stylist

Are You My Mother?

David Grossman

*Winner of the Heinrich Heine Prize for Literature* 
 
A hundred and fifty years of conflict. What does that do to a person’s soul, to the spirit of a nation? To both the occupied and the occupier? 
 
International Booker Prize-winning Israeli novelist David Grossman has spent decades campaigning for peace in Israel and Palestine. But after October 7th 2023, a day marking the biggest loss of Jewish life in this century, he retreated inwards to ask himself difficult and necessary questions about his beloved nation: 
 
How could this massacre have happened? 
How could the Netanyahu government, tangled in its web of scandals, fail to protect its citizens? 
And did October 7 and the war that followed take with it their last hope of a two-state solution? 
 
In eleven essays David Grossman traces the years leading up to that day and the ensuing war through a string of failures by a morally bankrupt party clinging to power. He documents the struggle being fought on both sides between those committed to conflict, and the many who simply want to live in peace. 
 
Ultimately, Grossman arrives at the most important question of all: Will there ever be a lasting peace in the region?

The Thinking Heart

On Israel and Palestine

‘The blessing of an inherently interpretive medium like comics is that it hasn't allowed me to . . . make a virtue of dispassion. For good or for ill, the comics medium is adamant, and it has forced me to make choices. In my view, that is part of its message’ – from the preface by Joe Sacco 
 
Over the past decade, Joe Sacco has increasingly turned to short-form com­ics journalism to report from conflict zones around the world. Collected here for the first time, Sacco's darkly funny, revealing reportage confirms his standing as one of the foremost international correspondents working today. 
 
Journalism takes readers from the smuggling tunnels of Gaza to war crimes trials in The Hague, from the lives of India's 'untouchables' to the ordeal of sub-Saharan refugees washed up on the shores of Malta. Sacco also confronts the misery and absurdity of the war in Iraq, including the darkest chapter in recent American history – the torture of detainees. 
 
Vividly depicting Sacco's own interactions with the people he meets, the stories in this remarkable collection argue for the essential truth in comics reportage, an inevitably subjective journalistic endeavour. Among Sacco's most mature and accomplished work, Journalism demonstrates the power of a great comics artist to chronicle lived experience with a force that often eludes other media.

Journalism

Arthur Lubow

Diane Arbus was one of the greatest photographers of the last century. Her portraiture of freaks, circus performers, twins, nudists and others on the social margins connected with a wide public at a deep psychological level. Her suicide in New York in 1971 overshadowed the reception to her work. Her posthumous exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art a year later drew lines around the block. 
 
She was born into a Russian-Jewish family, the Nemerovs, who owned a department store on Fifth Avenue. They were family friends with the Avedons. Richard Avedon later championed Arbus’s work. Avedon rose to greater and greater commercial success through the magazine world. Arbus died in a rent-protected apartment scrambling to earn her keep with odd teaching assignments. Lubow’s biography begins at the moment Arbus quit the world of commercial photography to be an artist. She was uncompromising in that ambition. The book ends with her death. The entire narrative is a slow march towards that event.

Diane Arbus

Wise, often funny, sometimes heart-breaking, Persepolis tells the story of Marjane Satrapi's life in Tehran from the ages of six to fourteen, growing up during the Iranian Revolution. 
 
The intelligent and outspoken child of radical Marxists, and the great-grandaughter of Iran's last emperor, Satrapi bears witness to a childhood uniquely entwined with the history of her country. Persepolis paints an unforgettable portrait of daily life in Iran and of the bewildering contradictions between home life and public life. 
 
Amidst the tragedy, Marjane's child's eye view adds immediacy and humour, and her story of a childhood at once outrageous and ordinary, beset by the unthinkable and yet buffered by an extraordinary and loving family, is immensely moving. 
 
'The magic of Marjane Satrapi's work is that it can condense a whole country's tragedy into one poignant, funny scene after another' Independent on Sunday 
 
**ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY**

Persepolis

The Story of an Iranian Childhood

Emma-Lee Moss

A story of pop music, identity crisis and Hong Kong, from the acclaimed singer-songwriter Emma-Lee Moss (a.k.a. Emmy the Great) 
 
For 11-year-old Emma-Lee, the sound of Hong Kong in the summer of 1995 is Cantopop. The Cantopop stars she idolises, at the height of their stratospheric fame, are seen on every billboard and heard on every street corner. Later that year, she and her family will leave the city to live in England, pushing Emma-Lee’s love of Cantopop underground – the sound and symbol of her secret childhood identity. 
 
My Cantopop Nights is the story of how Emma found herself in a Hong Kong bar twenty years later, listening to a Cantopop song and realising that this music was her inheritance. It’s about how she suffers an identity crisis just as the city’s post-colonial tensions erupt into the 2019 protests. It’s a story of uncanny coincidences, magical thinking and a quest to reconcile the different sides of her inheritance: Hong Konger and British, Cantopop and indie. 
 
It’s about falling in love with a city, a country, its people and its music, while she seeks to find her own place within it.

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