Esther’s Notebooks

From the author of The Arab of the Future, comes the first book in a bestselling series of graphic novels that follow the hilarious, heartbreaking, and all painfully true life of a real girl growing up in Paris

Every week, the comic book artist Riad Sattouf has a chat with his friend’s 10-year old daughter, Esther. She tells him about her life, her family, her school, her friends, her hopes, her dreams and her fears. And then he creates a one-page comic strip based on what she says.

This book is a collection of 156 of those strips, comprising the first three volumes as they appeared in Europe, spanning Esther’s life from age 10 to 12.

As The Guardian noted: Each page of Esther’s Notebooks is self-contained-there’s usually a neat punchline-but read them all, and you come to see that Sattouf has drawn a portrait of a generation: their hopes, dreams and cultural references; the way that their personalities, backgrounds-many of the children portrayed have parents who are immigrants-and preconceived ideas about sexuality begin to play out even before they’ve begun secondary school. The result is a bit like a cartoon version of Michael Apted’s landmark TV series, Up. These funny, well-observed comics are fantastically daring.