The Gift is Zoe Maeve’s debut YA graphic novel about Anastasia Nikolaevna, daughter of the last tsar of Russia.
By Heather Leighton
Graphic Novels
My Body in Pieces is Marie-Noëlle Hébert’s first graphic memoir, which recounts her personal journey coming to terms with her own body.
By Heather Leighton
Aminder Dhaliwal’s graphic novel Cyclopedia Exotica takes place in a world where the Cyclops, an exotic subspecies of humans marked by their single eye, live alongside “two-eyed” humans.
By Esinam Beckley
The graphic novel follows the cartoonist’s mother, the plucky, fifty-something Soyeon, and her female friends.
By Heather Leighton
If you’re looking for a hard sci-fi space-colony love story featuring giant ladies, then TITAN is the book for you. But maybe that’s not specifically what you’re after – in that case read TITAN for a pointed adventure that is incredibly deep and complex, telling more story in its 500-some trichromatic panels than could be told in 500 pages of text.
By Natalia Yanchak
Born in Aarau, Switzerland, cartoonist Anna Sommer is the force behind The Unknown, translated from the German by Helge Dascher. The Unknown is Sommer’s fifth book, which was showcased as part of the 2018 Official Selection of Angoulême, France’s internationally renowned comics festival. This is no small feat, given that only five women cartoonists were among the forty-five bédéistes in the Official Selection.
By Heather Leighton
Aquino, a trailblazer in her own right, understands how to synthesize other people’s stories with conscious grace. Each chapter contains detailed glances into the routines, personalities, and idiosyncrasies of its subject while simultaneously covering their whole lifespan, all in eight to ten pages.
By Marcela Huerta
In this collection of comic strips, as in the previous three, Delisle, a stay-at-home dad, makes some questionable parenting decisions involving his children, Louis and Alice. In this final book, Delisle’s children are obviously older, and as life would have it, both children have developed their own interests.
By Heather Leighton
Keum Suk Gendry-Kim, the award-winning author of Grass, is known for both her work about the marginalized and for her manhwa, a South Korean comic style. Grass is a graphic work of non-fiction about a former comfort woman, Lee Ok-sun, during World War II.
By Heather Leighton
The title of Michael DeForge’s new book, Leaving Richard’s Valley, hints at the deft mix of whimsical and sinister themes within: four animal friends must leave their home in an idyllic, cult-like community and face a Toronto mired in condo construction and gentrification. This is DeForge’s latest Drawn & Quarterly title, and it’s obvious why NPR calls the author “one of the comic-book industry’s most exciting, unpredictable talents.” Leaving Richard’s Valley dissects community, public space, and the dubious line between adventure and exile.
By Mark Ambrose Harris
Creating a graphic memoir of your childhood is a daunting task, particularly if it was not picture perfect. In Chicken Rising, D. Boyd pens a series of vignettes that make up the early life of Dawn, D. Boyd’s younger self, in Saint John, New Brunswick in the 1970s.
By Heather Leighton
There are books that have the ability to draw you into their universe, projecting vivid scenes in your mind, making you ruminate time and again on the characters’ actions and reflections. Bad Friends, a newly translated graphic novel by the South Korean comic artist Ancco, is one such book. In her fictionalized retelling of a troubled adolescence, Ancco instills the reader with empathy for her teenage characters and their bleak circumstances.
By Eloisa Aquino