From the Tour de France and Moomin to a life-affirming cancer memoir, it’s been a great year for tales told in pen and ink
This has been a good year for graphic novels, and I’ll get to my highlights in a moment. First, though, my comic book of 2014: Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? (Bloomsbury £18.99) by Roz Chast. I know, I know… a book about crumbling parents, care homes, incontinence pads, memory loss and, well, death, doesn’t sound like much of a Christmas present. But this is also the year’s funniest book; I simply can’t imagine the person who wouldn’t be happy to receive it. George and Elizabeth Chast, married for 63 years, still live in their chaotic apartment in la Brooklyn Profonde. But it is increasingly clear they can no longer cope alone. What should Roz, their only child, do? And will she be able to rein in her exasperation while she works it out? Hysterical, but also plangent and thoroughly ghoulish, this is a seriously brilliant book. Invest in multiple copies.
Now let’s move on. Graphic novels take their readers all over the place these days, and in about the same time it takes most of us to get into town on the bus. On this score, I recommend Polina , Bastien Vivès’s vivid ballet-school drama, set in Moscow and Berlin; Fatherland by Nina Bunjevac, a devastating memoir that explores the impact of one man’s Serbian nationalism on his family; and (my favourite) Just So Happens , in which Fumio Obata tells the story of a young Japanese woman returning to the country of her birth for her father’s funeral, deftly unpicking the idea of what it means to be an exile as he goes along (all three are published by Jonathan Cape, £16.99 each).
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