Graphic Nonfiction Books

“These are stories of young people in Iran who can’t freely have relationships. it’s about the life of young couples in Iran. There are no public displays of affection, you can’t choose who you marry. We’re not ignorant of what’s going on in Iran, but you don’t really realize at what level things are until you read this. Also, you learn about Iranian culture. You’re not supposed to drink, but they have these elegant parties in their apartments. The life there is not free like our life. They’re not even free to love.” Read more...

Five Graphic Novels People Need to Read

Ivanka Hahnenberger, Translator

“Olympic Dream is the story of Samia Yusuf Omar. If you watched the 2008 Beijing Olympics, she was the young Somalian woman who came in last…She doesn’t have the right clothes, she doesn’t really have the right shoes. But she runs, and she doesn’t give up. Everyone in the stadium was on their feet applauding her, because she had to defy her nation and defy her culture to get to be able to run. No one left the stadium before she finished, they’re all sitting there watching her, not a dry eye in the house…Reinhard Kleist traces this whole story of hers, and her family at home: how people gave up a lot to get the money so she could be smuggled. I’m not going to tell you what happens. It’s just the incredible story of this woman. I really recommend this book. It’s extraordinary.” Read more...

Five Graphic Novels People Need to Read

Ivanka Hahnenberger, Translator

“I feel this book is really important, because it’s easier to swallow than many of the big books that we have on the history of the A-bomb…The story is really emotional when you see it in pictures. In the beginning, you see the excitement in the scientists’ faces when they discover the chain reaction. It’s an incredible thing. They go into a squash court at the University of Chicago, and it actually happens. Everybody’s shocked and amazed and excited… The way they depict Einstein and his suffering… Everybody was saying, ‘We need to have the A-bomb.’ But then, when you have it, you realize you’ve created a monster.” Read more...

Five Graphic Novels People Need to Read

Ivanka Hahnenberger, Translator

“This is an amazing, graphic and emotional book. Sacco writes about the massacres carried out by the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip in 1956. He completed the book in 2003 so it resonates with the present. It’s really about memory: how it can fool you and change things. He sifts through the memories of the witnesses he meets in Gaza to get to the truth of the two atrocities – one in Rafah, the other in Khan Younis.” Read more...

The best books on Palestine

Raja Shehadeh, Lawyer

“One of the brilliant things about Tom Toles’s cartoons is that he…makes people realise how really crazy some of the things that climate change deniers say are and how crazy some of the things they do are. I could go on for hours lecturing about some of these things but with Tom Toles’s cartoons you get it in an instant.” Read more...

The best books on The Politics of Climate Change

Naomi Oreskes, Scientist

“It’s a wonderful look both biographically and artistically and scientifically at Marie and Pierre Curie, although Pierre dies about halfway through the book because he was run over by a horse carriage and killed. It talks at length about Marie Curie’s affair, after Pierre’s death, with Pierre’s student Paul Langevin and the impact that had. You can imagine in the early 20th century it wasn’t easy. The book really does blend the scientific and the personal very, very beautifully…It’s graphic nonfiction.” Read more...

Nuclear Books

Richard Wolfson, Scientist

“If I have a preferred book to read about the Holocaust, it’s probably the graphic novel Maus by Art Spiegelman, about his parents’ experience in Poland. Many have read it, but if you haven’t, you must. It’s set in late 1970s New York, and is as much about the son’s relationship with the father who went through all this, as it is about the events of the 1930s and 40s in Poland.” Read more...

VE Day Books: A Personal List

Sophie Roell, Journalist

“It’s part of the Introducing… series that presents various topics in graphic form, a bit like a comic book. What I liked about this one is that it takes a very complex issue and shows that you do not need to be a great philosopher, or have a very deep understanding of the science, to understand why it’s a complex issue and what the fundamental questions we’re dealing with are…Despite being highly approachable, this book is a serious piece of work that gives a great overview of past and current thinking about consciousness, especially from the philosophical perspective.” Read more...

Consciousness for Beginners: the best book

David Carmel, Psychologist

“This is by Yoram Bauman, who is perhaps better known as the stand-up economist. He sprang to fame because of this lecture – you can see it on YouTube – which was a stand-up comedy routine, based on a parody of one of the most famous economics textbooks, Greg Mankiw’s Principles of Economics. Bauman has a PhD in economics, so he knows a lot of economics, and there’s actually quite a lot of wisdom woven into the comedy routine, but he just lays into economics. Then he decided that the next thing he wanted to do was write this cartoon introduction to economics. And, just to be clear, this is a textbook. It’s not a comic book with some economic messages, it’s a textbook in the form of a cartoon. But it’s quite sophisticated and it’s very nicely done…For anybody who is genuinely interested in economics, who really wants to learn the jargon, or anyone who is starting out studying an economics course, this is just a brilliant source. It really is rigorous, but it’s also a lot of fun to read.” Read more...

Unexpected Economics Books

Tim Harford, Economist

“Now you have more and more Westerners who are interested in this kind of philosophy and doing philosophy globally. But there is a sense in which Zhuangzi is profound, but also funny and light-hearted. There are a lot of really silly moments, almost. And I think that this version of Zhuangzi—and I have three different versions—is the only one that really captures this playfulness, helps to remind you, when you’re reading it, that, ‘Okay, this is a serious philosophical text, but it’s also a silly and playful philosophical text.’ I think that this format does that very well.” Read more...

The Best Illustrated Philosophy Books

Helen De Cruz, Philosopher

“The story starts with a lecture by Bertrand Russell. You have Russell standing there on the podium and he starts his lecture by saying, ‘Okay we’re now in this situation, should we fight against the Nazis? Yes, or no?’ It’s 1939, and there is this whole thing in the UK, should they or shouldn’t they? Should they be trying to keep the peace with the Nazis? And that didn’t go very well, it didn’t last very long. Russell was a pacifist and the audience knew that. And he says, ‘Well, before we do that we have to think about the rules of thoughts, to make such a decision.’ And then you go back in the past, and you see Russell and the people around him.” Read more...

The Best Illustrated Philosophy Books

Helen De Cruz, Philosopher

“‘Fun Home’ is short for the funeral home Alison’s dad ran when she was a child. It’s a book that blew me away and continues to blow me away every time I read it – and I must have read it five or six times by now: probably the best book I’ve read in the past ten years in any genre or form. It’s an incredibly crafted book in which the chapters are not chronological but thematic, and each chapter is keyed to a book that her father loved. So it’s not a book about what happened to her father, a closeted gay man who committed suicide a few months after Alison herself came out when she was 19. It’s about looking through a family archive to try and get a sense of her father’s particularity.” Read more...

The Best Graphic Narratives

Hillary Chute, Literary Scholar

“Eleven artists, eleven chapters from cuneiform to Comic Sans, the whole thing is lent a gorgeous graphic identity by none other than the cantankerous, radical underground cartoonist and diehard indie Jean-Christophe Menu. As a founding member of L’Association, he masterminded their selection and design of forgotten classics brought back into print. Together, they’ve created a bristling yet unified history of a ubiquitous yet somehow still niche subject. Serifs, frakturs, Gutenberg, Garamond, Gill Sans, Bauhaus, newspapers and Letraset.” Read more...

The Best European Graphic Novels

Edward Gauvin, Translator

“It really gets into the feel of what it was like then, throughout the Islamic revolution and the Iran-Iraq war. It shows the history of Iran through one person’s life, and the people around her. The author’s family wanted the revolution, which was when the people in Iran revolted against the monarch. Her grandfather was a prince, but he became a communist. They were a pretty well-off family, but they still wanted the Shah to leave. The Shah wasn’t doing a good job of ruling, and I think most people wanted that to change. But they had no idea that Iran would become even more oppressive than before, after becoming an Islamic republic. This graphic novel describes how it got worse and how horrible it was.” Read more...

The Best Graphic Novels for 10-12 Year Olds

Harald, Children

“This series has been a cultural and a publishing phenomenon in France and I think now it is starting to be in the US too…It’s similar in some ways—and radically different in others—to Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. Both are a view of conflict in the Middle East. Persepolis is about the Iran-Iraq war, the Islamic Revolution, and a right-wing, Islamic viewpoint, which The Arab of the Future also deals with, in part. Both have a child at the centre of the story. The child anchors the narrative, and we see events unfolding in a chronological, linear way from the point of view of the child. That was something that Persepolis established as a really compelling form. The Arab of the Future has echoes of that.” Read more...

Best Comics of 2016

Hillary Chute, Literary Scholar

“This book shows how political the personal is, if it makes any sense to invert that idiom. It balances attention to the world historical stage with attention to what is happening within this family.” Read more...

The Best Comics of 2018

Hillary Chute, Literary Scholar

“It’s inspired by a refugee from Somalia, Omar Mohamed, who is one of the co-authors. It’s roughly the story of him growing up in a refugee camp in Kenya and trying to get to safety in America. It’s about spending so many years there, waiting.” Read more...

The Best Audiobooks for Kids of 2020

Emily Connelly, Journalist

“Hey, Kiddo was a National Book Award finalist as a graphic memoir, recognising the literary power of Krosoczka’s personal story of his mother’s heroin addiction and childhood with alcoholic grandparents. It’s told from the point of view of Krosoczka at age 17, and teens forge an immediate connection with the author’s description of how his artistic talent helped him survive his upbringing.” Read more...

The 2020 Audie Awards: Best Multi-Voiced Performance

“This is an unusual story. Part of the reason that I love it so much is because, although influenced by that Francophone bande dessinée style, it comes out of the mind of an African comic genius, Barly Baruti. It’s in the Francophone tradition, but very much Congolese. He creates an amazing story, loosely based on historical fact. The loosest thing is that it seems like the German ship that they’re all hunting gets blown up by our heroes, but that is not what really happened. It wasn’t sunk but was eventually abandoned by the Germans. I’m completely willing to forgive that detail. It’s about a real person named Madame Livingstone—a local man who was a scout for the Belgians. He dressed in a kilt, which is why he was sometimes called Madame. He claimed to be descended from Livingstone, the great explorer and philanthropist, who allegedly had a relationship with a local woman. There are two tiny pieces of evidence that this might be true, but it doesn’t matter, because it’s not Barly Baruti who makes up that story. He is this stunning figure, who guides Belgian pilots to attack this German ship.” Read more...

The Best Comics on African History

Trevor Getz, Historian

“GoSt 111 is one of my sweetheart books…It’s really fun because it shows you a piece of Paris, and life in general, that you don’t know. It’s about underground life and how it’s a struggle. This guy is a Serb and no matter what he does, he seems to get involved in thuggery instead of getting on the straight and narrow. He’s got a little girl, and his mother, her grandmother, is helping out. He gets out of jail and tries to avoid it, but once again, he gets drawn in. He always seems to get drawn down the wrong path. It’s fiction, but it could be true, just not being able to get out.” Read more...

Five Graphic Novels People Need to Read

Ivanka Hahnenberger, Translator

“Chaos in Kinshasa is one of my favorites. Partly it’s because I remember the whole Rumble in the Jungle story happening — I’m that old! I was in Philly, where I remember seeing Cassius Clay’s name, his switch to Muhamed Ali, and then he was going over there, to Kinshasa. Being Black in Africa is different from being Black in America—it’s not the same culture at all. I remember it was quite eye opening for a lot of people, whites and Blacks alike.And then to read this story! I never knew about all the political intrigue that was going on at the time and that it was a pawn in a political game. I was too young to get that—all the African politics, how Angola was involved. It’s amazing that these authors managed to get all that into this book and at the same time make it fun and funny. It’s really great. I totally recommend it. If you didn’t have any idea of the intrigue and politics behind the Rumble in the Jungle, you have to read this.” Read more...

Five Graphic Novels People Need to Read

Ivanka Hahnenberger, Translator

“I read a court case where a young African woman, Abina Mansah, who didn’t speak English, went before a British judge and complained that she had been enslaved. She said, ‘I could not take care of my body and myself.’ I wanted to know what she meant and what her experiences were. I followed that for many years, trying to understand what was going on. In my classroom, I wanted students to understand how historians struggle to hear the voices of people like her and what tools we can have to do that. It suddenly occurred to me that the way I could do that best was to give students my interpretation of her words in comic form, and then to give students the tools to question or come up with their own interpretations of what it meant. That’s what my comic book is. More than anything, it’s a teaching tool. It’s an attempt to help the students understand why we should listen for these voices and how we can do that.” Read more...

The Best Comics on African History

Trevor Getz, Historian

“You don’t see many stories set in Zimbabwe, which made this graphic novel a bit different for me. The art is nice and colourful and depicts the nature of southern Africa really well. The characters are well written and it’s a good story. I like it. The main character, Siku… has to make a decision and face her powers and stop the river god getting killed. So she goes on a big adventure with some pirates and an Italian boy whose mum is an engineer working to build the dam. The Kariba dam really exists on the Zambesi river. It was built in the 1950s so the story is set then, although it is fantasy. It’s about having to make a choice between the environment and development, or whether there is a way to find a balance. This book has quite a lot of pages, I think it’s best for 10-13 year olds.” Read more...

The Best Graphic Novels for 10-12 Year Olds

Harald, Children

“Conyngham is the mover behind this book, but he found a whole bunch of different South African artists to do the art. It’s a collaboration. Although there is coherence across the chapters, you have some very different kinds of art, which is quite interesting. It’s about resistance and rebellion in South Africa, but it takes place almost entirely before apartheid (though the last chapter does go into the apartheid era). It’s a book that comes out of the archives of South Africa’s Supreme Court of Appeal. At the end of apartheid, the new government built this incredible Supreme Court, with an archive, to provide a beacon of law, if you will, for across the continent. You can go there, it’s open. Richard Conyngham looked in this archive and pulled out all these stories about resistance and rebellion. They’re not all about race. Some are about class and labor, which may be surprising to some people. But before 1948, that’s appropriate, because class mattered as well. They are sketches of stories of the people who make up South Africa. It’s about Indian resistance to being forced to register. It’s about mine workers who are on strike because of horrible conditions in the mines. It’s about the way that colonialism appointed these state-controlled chiefs, and the way people revolted against these chiefs acting as stooges to control their movement and labor.” Read more...

The Best Comics on African History

Trevor Getz, Historian

“Aya and her friends grow up in a big city. Côte D’Ivoire was pretty wealthy at the time, at least in the urban areas. But the main character in this story are working class. They go out, they go to dances. One of them gets pregnant. It’s an incredible imagining of these things. When Marguerite Abouet wanted to write about her life, she was really inspired by Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, which is perhaps the best-known classroom-friendly graphic history of all (even more so than Art Spiegelman’s Maus, which is getting banned in the US now). Although Marjane Satrapi comes from Iran, she was living in France, and she created a very French-style comic.” Read more...

The Best Comics on African History

Trevor Getz, Historian

“The story told in Crossroads is not about their suffering, per se. It’s the story of their resistance, told in their own words. It’s a history of an informal community that wasn’t allowed to exist and the women who successively resisted attempts to dismantle it, force everyone to move, and bring it into line. Koni worked closely with the local community to pull out their experiences while these women are still alive. The things they went through are horrible, but the ways in which they fought back—putting on plays, grabbing sticks and beating police informers and such—are amazing.” Read more...

The Best Comics on African History

Trevor Getz, Historian

“It’s based on Miyamoto Musashi, who was a very well-known swordsman in the Edo period. The beautiful thing is that Stan Sakai, who wrote it, his family were Japanese immigrants to America. It was his way of connecting to their culture, to tell stories that don’t get told in America. One way of doing it is to throw an anthropomorphic animal at it, so that people are willing to listen. It’s a brilliant move, because if he had just gone, ‘Here we go, I’m doing Edo period samurai’ you would have had a lot less uptake. There is something about using animals that brings people in.” Read more...

Best Graphic Histories

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“Queer: A Graphic History is incredible. It does a great job of breaking down a complex narrative and showing what you can do with pictures. This book is how I got the idea to do my own. I was walking along a canal in Oxford with friends talking about how great it was, and how it’s a really effective format for explaining ideas like this, and my husband said, ‘why don’t you do one?’ I thought, ‘that’s a great question. Why don’t I?’ So this is the graphic history that got me to do a graphic history very directly.” Read more...

Best Graphic Histories

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“It’s like enriched uranium in comic form—non-radioactive, good stuff, full of energy. I read it when it came out, I was at art school. It really did shape the way that I went forward and thought about sequential imagery. I still use it to this day, when teaching storyboarding. It’s about telling stories, all that stuff. It also gives you some comic theory, all distilled into one little book that you can just read, and then feel like, ‘I’ve got a PhD in understanding comics.’” Read more...

Best Graphic Histories

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