Like last year's Pyongyang, about his similar stint in North Korea, Shenzhen is a casual, dryly witty series of observations... Delisle's got an animator's eye for quirks of motion, analyzing the arc of a public fountain's water and the way street vendors make popcorn in a pressure cooker. The best artwork in the book is his impressionistic, unnarrated pen-and-ink-wash drawings of Shenzhen's drab buildings and billboards, but Delisle's keen awareness of how and why he can't connect to the city makes for a rarity: a thoroughly engaging memoir of being bored to distraction.

Combining a gift for anecdote and an ear for absurd dialogue, Delisle's retelling of his adventures makes a gently humorous counterpoint to the daily news stories about the axis of evil, a Lost in Translation for the Communist world. Delisle's simple but expressive art works well with his account, humanizing the few North Koreans he gets to know and facilitating digressions into North Korean history and various bizarre happenings involving brandy and bear cubs. Pyongyang will appeal to multiple audiences: current events buffs, Persepolis fans and those who just love a good yarn

News coverage from North Korea is scant - the regime of the world's last true totalitarian state is not exactly welcoming to foreign journalists. But a new graphic novel gives a rare, tragicomic, glimpse into everyday life in the drabbest of world capitals

The reigning king of the graphic travel memoir... Delisle's curiosity and amusement at the country's bizarre relationship with foreign visitors is equally funny and fascinating

A meditation on "impermanence" . . . emotionally compelling yet unsettling

A gorgeous symphony

Beautiful, mesmerizing, a dazzling experiment in form . . . both bleak and vivid and more a work of art than a comic book

The concept is stunningly simple, and in laying bare the universality of existence - its beauty, ugliness, and mundanity - it is utterly moving

McGuire adds lavish color and some plot, but he preserves the captivating, uncanny sense of love, anger and tragedy flying across the centuries while staying in one place.

One of the most engaging graphic novel experiments in book form I've ever seen

Here heightens our awareness of how much has gone before and is still to come

Rarely does a conceptual work seize the emotions like Here. Every moment seems insignificant compared with the massive sweep of time, and yet the most trivial actions take on an aching poignancy

Almost overwhelmingly poignant. His masterful sense of time and the power of the mundane makes this feel like the graphic novel equivalent of Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life

Completely wonderful

You begin to appreciate McGuire's extraordinary command of history and pacing . . . the non-chronological arrangement seems faithful to how consciousness really works

A page-turning graphic novel… sharp, witty, deliciously observant and so exquisitely drawn it took my breath away. The perfect book for Christmas.

The visual and moral chiaroscuro of the novel, and its unflinching depiction of pathos and loneliness in the most and least privileged of social milieus, make it a strong contender, if not for the meretricious glitter of literary awards, then for the more lasting prize of inclusion in the canon of comic-strip masterpieces.

Posy Simmonds’s…line and way of telling a story are equally deft.