This tightly wound, humane and suspenseful non-fiction graphic novella employs visual devices from the best traditions of film noir. Sacco's finely wrought, expressively rendered black and white drawings perfectly capture the emotional character of Sarajevo and the people who struggle to live there. This superlative and important story is easily one of the best comics non-fiction works of the year

Sacco is formidably talented. A meticulous reporter...and a gifted artist whose richly nuanced drawings tread a delicate path between cartoonishness and naturalism

Sacco's greatest achievement is to have so poignantly depicted oppression and horror in a form that manages to be both disarming and disquieting

One of the most original cartoonists of the past two decades

As absorbing as it is graced with a deceptive lightness of touch, it is clever, brilliantly pieced together, and utterly unusual.

One of the chief pleasures of this book is how the words and pictures collaborate to gesture at a territory that neither might reach alone.

Many of us are living out the unlived lives of our mothers. Alison Bechdel has written a graphic novel about this, sort of like a comic book by Virginia Woolf. You won't believe it until you read it - and you must!

Pure bliss.

Bechdel’s engaging, original graphic memoir explores her troubled relationship with her distant mother.

A complex, fascinating and intellectually rich memoir.

Very original and arresting.

Throughout, there are magnificent feats of connectivity, startlingly complex internal monologues that unfold with perfect simplicity… I haven’t encountered a book about being an artist, or about the punishing entanglements of mothers and daughters, as engaging, profound or original as this one in a long time.

Lively, fresh and expressive…humane, complex and beautiful.

Don’t let the cartoons fool you, this is an exciting and intelligent book and, at many points, highly moving. It doesn’t just tell Alison’s story, Are You My Mother? allows to you to think about your own.

Find everything this author has written. Every jot she makes on the paper enriches the baroque, painful, exhilarating story she has to tell.

It’s first and foremost funny, using graphical and verbal tricks to express the psychological dramas of an American household.

A tour de force of fine detail.

The houses are blocks of black studded with burning orange windows. It’s just a street with buildings on it with normal people living in them. But what Ware has told us about buildings turned each orange window into a frame.

Building Stories may be the most concerted and apparently counter-intuitive attempt in any graphic novel to take us inside the life, thoughts and emotions of one fictional, unnamed character and make us care. That he succeeds, without the manipulative heartstring-tugging of cinema or theatre but with comics, is all the more remarkable.

Masterful, beautifully constructed, beautifully drawn tales of domestic boredom, agony and bliss.

Ware's graphic restraint has impressive emotional force; this is a work to pore over, from an artist like no other.

Moving and indescribably accomplished graphic novel...sent my jaw south and my eyebrows north.

The sadness of the narrative is fractured by the fizziness of its construction: a gorgeous book full of overlapping stories.

So bleak, observant and meticulously crafted that it merits that usually empty old word: masterpiece.

Ten years of intricate, ingenious work captured in one hefty box packed with graphic novels, pamphlets and a cartoon newspaper. Ware brilliantly charts the everyday experiences of the various inhabitants of a three-storey Chicago building in forensic, melancholic detail.

A big, sturdy box containing hard-bound volumes, pamphlets and a tabloid houses Ware’s demanding, melancholy and magnificent graphic novel about the inhabitants of a Chicago building.

This is long worth the wait ... sumptuously printed and lovingly presented.

Both a beautiful object and a work of tremendous power, that sets new standards for the graphic novel form. I can't stop talking about it.

In both imagination and execution, his artistry is faultless. A song to lettering, line, ink, Chicago, hope, regret and the history of comics, the emotions he arouses will stay with you long after closing the box it came in.