March 2012

You don't call something a graphic novel unless it deserves the weight. This massive Thompson album lives up to the name—text and image woven together so tight you can't separate them. Multiple reading layers stack on top of each other. Dodola's story threads through it all, complex and uncompromising.

Lampedusa. Off Sicily's coast. Filippo's family pulled their living from the sea for generations. Cost his father everything. Still out there fishing with his grandfather Ernesto. His mother Giuletta wants out—wants to sell, wants tourists, wants anything but this life tied to water and risk.

Victorian England knew Trollope cold. France? Barely translated him, barely remembers him. But back then—huge readership, major voice. This brick of a book takes aim at his era's worst habits. The title says it all. "What times we live in." Still cuts.

2010. France-Russia Year. Fifteen French writers got tickets on the Trans-Siberian—that mythical train cutting 9,288 kilometers from Moscow in the west to Vladivostok in the east. Fernandez among them. What came out of that journey: this.