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- Aya by Marguerite Abouet. Ivory Coast, 1978. It’s a golden time, and the nation, too—an oasis of affluence and stability in West Africa—seems fueled by something wondrous. Aya is loosely based upon Marguerite Abouet’s youth in Yop City. It is the story of the studious and clear-sighted nineteen-year-old Aya, her easygoing friends Adjoua and Bintou, and their meddling relatives and neighbors. It’s a wryly funny, breezy account of the simple pleasures and private troubles of everyday life in Yop City.
- Halina Filipina: A New Yorker in Manila by Arnold Arre. Halina Mitchell is half-Filipino, half-American. She’s also a native New Yorker–sophisticated, beautiful and confident. On her first visit to the Philippines, she arrives in Manila to reconnect with relatives only to encounter a world of surprises that turn all her assumptions on their head. With the intrepid film critic Cris as her guide, she discovers a Manila that few others get to see! Cris’s wry takes on bad movies offer Halina a new lens on the modern world as he whisks her through his hometown at breakneck speed–including a crash course in Manila street life and the thrills and perils of midnight driving. In turn, Halina gives the struggling writer a newfound appreciation for his city.
- Mikel by Mark Bellido. Mikel lives with his wife and two children in Costur, an idyllic Spanish town surrounded by hills. He has a job selling candy, but Mikel is a dreamer, not a businessman, and money is tight. What’s more, the ordinariness of smalltown life is preventing him from fulfilling a life-long dream: to become a writer. Seeking both drama and financial security, Mikel takes a job as a bodyguard. His family is soon uprooted to the Basque Country, where Mikel is charged with protecting politicians from the armed separatist group ETA. It is a job that provides drama worthy of the page—but only at the cost of fear, uncertainty, and family breakdown.
- Memories from Limón by Edo Brenes. Ramiro leaves the British drizzle and his beloved fiancé Yoss to investigate his family history back home in Costa Rica. What starts as an innocent fascination with an old family photo album leads to conversations with the older generations and revelations he is not prepared for. This intimate and evocative graphic novel uncovers a family secret, set against the idyllic Caribbean coastline in one of the most beautiful countries in Latin America.
- The Dancing Plague by Gareth Brookes. Set in 1518, and told from the imagined perspective of Mary, one of the witnesses, The Dancing Plague tells the true story of when hundreds of Strasbourg’s inhabitants were suddenly seized by the strange and unstoppable compulsion to dance. Prone to mystic visions as a child, betrayed in the convent to which she flees, then abused by her loutish husband, Mary endures her life as an oppressed and ultimately scapegoated woman with courage, strength, and inspiring beauty. As difficult to interpret now (as a psychological reaction to social injustice?) as it was then (as a collective demonic possession?), the story of the “Dancing Plague” finds suitably extraordinary expression in the utterly unique mixed-media style Gareth Brookes has devised to tell it. The pioneering blend of his trademark “pyrographic” technique with sumptuously colorful—and literal—embroidery perfectly reflects, in a beautiful work of art, the enduring fragility of our human condition—from “choreomania” to coronavirus.
- Night Fever by Ed Brubaker. Who are you, really? Are you the things you do, or are you the person inside your mind? In Europe on a business trip, Jonathan Webb can’t sleep. Instead, he finds himself wandering the night in a strange foreign city, with his new friend, the mysterious and violent Rainer as his guide. Rainer shows Jonathan the hidden world of the night, a world without rules or limits. But when the fun turns dangerous, Jonathan may find himself trapped in the dark… And the question is, what will he do to get home?
- Algeria is Beautiful like America by Olivia Burton. Olivia had always heard stories about Algeria from her maternal grandmother, a Black Foot (a “Pied-Noir,” the French term for Christian and Jewish settlers of French Algeria who emigrated to France after the Algerian War of Independence). After her grandmother’s death, Olivia found some of her grandmother’s journals and letters describing her homeland. Now, ten years later, she resolves to travel to Algeria and experience the country for herself; she arrives alone, with her grandmother’s postcards and letters in tow, and with but a single phone number in her pocket, of an Algerian Djaffar, who will act as her guide. Olivia’s quest to understand her origins will bring her to face questions about heritage, history, shame, friendship, memory, nostalgia, fantasy, the nature of exile, and our unending quest to understand who we are and where we come from.
- The City of Belgium by Becht Evens. As night falls in the city of Belgium, three strangers in their late twenties—a most dangerous age—arrive at a popular restaurant. Jona is about to move away; he calls his wife, who’s already settled in Berlin, before trying to make plans with friends for one last night on the town. No one bites—they’re all busy, or maybe they just don’t want to party—but he’s determined to make this night something to remember. Victoria is lively and energetic, but surrounded by friends and family who are buzzkills, always worrying about what is best for her. Rodolphe is consoled by a friend and snaps out of his funk, becoming the life of the party. The three careen through the city’s nightlife spots and underbelly, chasing pleasure—or at least a few distractions from the thrum of the humdrum. Each has a series of adventures that reveal them to be teetering on the edge between lucid dream and tooth-grinding nightmare.
- Okinawa by Susumu Higa. Okinawa brings together two collections of intertwined stories by the island’s pre-eminent mangaka, Susumu Higa, which reflect on this difficult history and pull together traditional Okinawan spirituality, the modern-day realities of the continuing US military occupation, and the senselessness of the War. The first collection, Sword of Sand , is a ground level, unflinching look at the horrors of the Battle of Okinawa. Higa then turns an observant eye to the present-day in Mabui (Okinawan for “spirit”), where he explores how the American occupation has irreversibly changed the island prefecture, through the lens of the archipelago’s indigenous spirituality and the central character of the yuta priestess.
- Umma’s Table by Yeon-sik Hong. Madang is an artist and new father who moves to a quiet home in the countryside with his wife and young baby, excited to build a new life full of hope and joy, complete with a garden and even snow. But soon reality sets in and his attention is divided between his growing happy family and his impoverished parents back in Seoul in a dingy basement apartment. With an ailing mother in and out of the hospital and an alcoholic father, Madang struggles to overcome the exhaustion and frustration of trying to be everything all at a good son, devoted father, and loving husband. To cope, he finds himself reminiscing about their family meals together, particularly his mother’s kimchi, a traditional dish that is prepared by the family and requires months of fermentation. Memories of his mother’s glorious cooking―so good it would prompt a young Madang and his brother into song―soothe the family. With her impending death, Madang races to learn her recipes and bring together the three generations at the family table while it’s still possible. This is a beautiful and thoughtful meditation on how the kitchen and communal cooking―in the past, present, and future―bind a family together amidst the inevitable.
- Juliette, or the Ghosts Return in the Spring by Camille Jourdy. Juliette boards a train from Paris and comes back to her hometown hoping for a low-key visit with family and old friends. What she finds is anything but. Her sister, a caregiver and mother of two, is carrying on an elaborate affair with a man from a costume shop. Her parents, separated, are now estranged. Father is sure he’s coming down with Alzheimer’s, though it’s more likely that he’s simply getting old. Mother, on the other hand, revels in the second act of her life as a free woman, an artist with a show at their local gallery to prove it. Slowly, Juliette finds herself entangled with the unlikely Georges, a dyspeptic alcoholic who is stuck in his life. These divergent paths inevitably cross one another against a gloriously painted backdrop of eccentric small-town living.
- Restless by Joseph Kai. Set in Beirut, Lebanon, a city once known to be a vibrant cultural center of the region. It’s 30 years after the end of the civil war, and a few months before the disastrous explosion of August 2020. Samar, a young queer comic book artist, wanders between anguished dreams, childhood memories, romantic experiences, and Beirut’s alternative communities. This abstractly autobiographical story tells of the author’s anxiety over living in a complex city of changing colors and moods. Three powerful themes: art, sex, and political uprising, are interwoven in a compelling narrative and an otherworldly color palette.
- Liebestrasse by Greg Lockhard. During the final years of the Weimar Republic, Sam meets Philip in Berlin and they fall in love. Their romance is hit with an unspeakable reality as the Nazis come to power and fascism makes them a target.
- Today Is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life by Ulli Lust. Back in 1984, a rebellious,17-year-old, punked-out Ulli Lust set out for a wild hitchhiking trip across Italy, from Naples through Verona and Rome and ending up in Sicily. Twenty-five years later, this talented Austrian cartoonist has looked back at that tumultuous summer and delivered a long, dense, sensitive,and minutely observed autobiographical masterpiece. Miraculously combining a perfect memory for both emotional and physical detail with the sometimes painful lucidity two and half decades’ distance have brought to her understanding of the events, Lust meticulously shows the who, where, when, and how (specifically, how an often penniless young girl can survive for months on the road) of a sometimes dangerous and sometimes exhilarating journey. Particularly haunting is her portrait of her fellow traveler, the gangly, promiscuous devil-may-care Edi who veers from being her spunky, funny best friend in the world to an out-of-control lunatic with no consideration for anything but her own whims and desires.
- Papaya Salad by Elisa Macellari. The debut graphic novel from Thai-Italian illustrator Elisa Macellari, Papaya Salad tells the story of her great-uncle Sompong who found himself in Europe on military scholarship on the eve of World War II. A gentle and resolute man in love with books and languages, in search of his place in the world, Sompong chronicles his life during the war and falling for his wife, finding humor and joy even as the world changes irrevocably around him
- Listen, Beautiful Marcia by Marcello Quintanilha. Márcia is a nurse in a hospital near Rio and lives in a favela with her boyfriend, Aluisio, and her daughter, Jaqueline, whom she had very young with another man. Jaqueline, a troubled young adult, makes life difficult for her mother and Aluisio and rebelliously hangs out with members of a neighborhood gang, leading to violent altercations between mother and daughter. The situation degenerates even more when Jaqueline is arrested. Márcia and Aluisio, distraught, realize that Jaqueline is in deeper trouble than they ever thought. Listen, Beautiful Márcia is a fast-paced, flamboyantly colorful new graphic novel by one of the most important Brazilian graphic novelists working today.
- Spit Three Times by Davide Reviati. Guido and his pals Moreno and Katango are rebels without a cause living in a rural town of the Po Valley, a forsaken corner of the Italian countryside turned peripheral wasteland. Disaffected students of the local vocational high school, they spend their days trying to get high as a way to forget about the bleak hopelessness around them. As children, they enjoyed being the sons of rural folks and the country seemed to them a never-ending reservoir of wonders. Now that they are almost finished with high school, they much prefer to drive to the nearby Rimini and its Riviera, check out its flashy dance clubs and end up wasted on its shores. Near Guido live the Stancic, a family of Romani who escaped the communist regime of Marshal Tito and settled there just after World War II. Running parallel to the protagonist’s coming-of-age is the evolving relationship that the rural town has with this group of outsiders.
- The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. Persepolis is the story of Satrapi’s unforgettable childhood and coming of age within a large and loving family in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution; of the contradictions between private and public life in a country plagued by political upheaval; of her high school years in Vienna facing the trials of adolescence far from her family; of her homecoming—both sweet and terrible; and, finally, of her self-imposed exile from her beloved homeland. It is the chronicle of a girlhood and adolescence at once outrageous and familiar, a young life entwined with the history of her country yet filled with the universal trials and joys of growing up.
Looking for more books to read? Check our ever growing collection of book lists created by library staff.