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Livestock
Livestock
Apr 22, 2025 2:37 PM

Author:Hannah Berry

Livestock

Excitement is building for this year’s Twammies and Clementine Darling is hotly tipped to win Best Female Singer and Political Spokesperson!

The government is embarrassed about the leak of a confidential email exchange, but have you heard about Clementine’s new beau Devon Ayre? Yes, human cloning appears to have been legalised, but wasn’t Devon once together with Clementine’s arch rival Coral Jerome? And does it really matter what dubious corporate connections helped get this bill into place while Clementine and Coral are locking horns in a violent feud?

Livestock is a razor-sharp satire on our relationship with the media from critically acclaimed graphic novelist Hannah Berry. In the fight for the public’s attention, why let public interest get in the way?

Reviews

A satire set in a not-very-distant future (think tomorrow, or possibly the day after) … In this tale, the gruesome relationship between celebrity and politics has moved way beyond The One Show sofa… Knowing and savage, Livestock is that rare thing: a comic book that has only grown more essential in the gap between its inception and its publication.

—— Rachel Cooke , Observer

Hannah Berry’s graphic novels have a brilliantly threatening kind of British humour to them: you read them, you smirk, then you look over your shoulder... Livestock…tells the kind of story that will be familiar ground for viewers of Black Mirror and The Thick of It, mixing scathingly realistic political situations and dialogue with a satirical premise that balloons towards the absurd… The real meat of Livestock is in the bleak viciousness of its satire… This is comic fantasy with a knife up its sleeve.

—— Tim Martin , Daily Telegraph

A sharp socio-political satire, germane for the current political climate.

—— Nicola Streeten , Times Literary Supplement

Engaging and timely, a rich brew of celebrity, menace, media-spin and human cloning.

—— Posy Simmonds

Uneducated, pliant, easy to control - that's how our rulers want us. But in Hannah Berry's dark tale of celebrity and corporate greed, the people have other ideas. A parable for the Trump era.

—— Paul Mason

As sharp as Taylor Swift's marketing team, Berry slices through the info-celeb news nexus. Bloody funny.

—— Denise Mina

Hannah Berry’s new graphic novel Livestock is furious and funny, angry and amused by its own anger. It’s a future vision of a time when politics and celebrity are fused even more than they are today, when political spin is even more amoral and embedded than it is now.

—— Teddy Jamieson , Herald Scotland

This sharp satire, almost a little too on the nose by the time of publication, takes a populace easily distracted by celebrity culture to its logical extreme… With the understated, chilling final images, this book left me alternating between being entertained and disquieted...buy this now while it can still be described as a work of fiction.

—— Pete Redrup , Quietus

Hannah Berry’s stunning artwork is painstakingly meticulous and her narratives are always thought-provoking and playful.

—— Cath Tate and Nicola Street , i

This memoir’s realisation of urgency expresses itself in human beings’ silence, which might frustrate readers of prose memoir. But here it is an opportunity for Radtke’s readers to focus, stare, wonder – to remain within urgency itself... This is a riveting use of memoir.

—— Sarah Heston , Los Angeles Review of Books

In her exquisitely soul-, mind-, and heart-shattering debut graphic memoir, Kristen Radtke explores life's big questions surrounding grief, mortality, and the impermanence of the things – and the people – we love most.

—— Nylon

Radtke's life – and the way she beautifully elevates her deeply personal experiences into universal lessons – makes for brilliant, compelling, unforgettable art.

—— Bustle

Kristen Radtke leads us through a bleak and beautifully crafted story of heart and heartbreak – creation, connection, decay, and loss. Imagine Wanting Only This is challenging and inspiring.

—— Ellen Forney, New York Times bestselling author of MARBLES

Writer, illustrator, and editor Radtke’s graphic memoir does something difficult within just a few minimally designed, emotional pages: she transforms the over-studied experience of being a talented artist stuck in that yearning gulf between college’s purpose and life’s demands into something unique and thuddingly real.

—— Publishers Weekly
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