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The Arab of the Future: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1978-1984: A Graphic Memoir
Riad Sattouf · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorPersepolis: The Story of a Childhood
Marjane Satrapi · 160 pages
Wise, funny, and heartbreaking, Persepolis is Marjane Satrapi’s memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. In powerful black-and-white comic strip images, Satrapi tells the story of her life in Tehran from ages six to fourteen, years that saw the overthrow of the Shah’s regime, the triumph of the Islamic Revolution, and the devastating effects of war with Iraq. The intelligent and
Little White Duck : A Childhood in China
Na Liu, Andres Vera Martinez · 108 pages
The world is changing for two girls in China in the 1970s. Da Qin - Big Piano - and her younger sister, Xiao Qin - Little Piano - live in the city of Wuhan with their parents. For decades, China's government had kept the country separated from the rest of the world. When their country's leader, Chairman Mao, dies, new opportunities begin to emerge Da Qin and Xiao Qin soon learn that their childhoo
Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began
Art Spiegelman · 135 pages
"Acclaimed as a quiet triumph and a brutally moving work of art, the first volume of Art Spiegelman's Mausintroduced readers to Vladek Spieglman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and his son, a cartoonist trying to come to terms with his father, his father's terrifying story, and History itself. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), succeeds perfectly in shocking us out o
Angela's Ashes
Frank McCourt · 384 pages
"When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood." So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish im
Call It Sleep
Henry Roth · 599 pages
First published in 1934, and immediately hailed as a masterpiece, this is a novel of Jewish life full of the pain and honesty of family relationships.
Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood
Fatema Mernissi · 249 pages
"I was born in a harem in 1940 in Fez, Morocco..." So begins Fatima Mernissi in this exotic and rich narrative. With a magical tale-spinner's words, this world-renowned scholar, one of the most eloquent voices of feminism in the Muslim world, weaves her own memories with dreams and fantasies of the women who surrounded her in the courtyard of her childhood. It is the magic of recreating a world o
The Reason You Walk
Wab Kinew · 273 pages
When his father was given a diagnosis of terminal cancer, Winnipeg broadcaster and musician Wab Kinew decided to spend a year reconnecting with the accomplished but distant aboriginal man who'd raised him. Born to an Anishinaabe father and a non-native mother, he has a foot in both cultures. He is a Sundancer, an academic, a former rapper, a hereditary chief, and an urban activist. Kinew writes af
Losing My Cool: How a Father's Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture
Thomas Chatterton Williams · 225 pages
Barefoot Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child
Elva Trevino Hart · 236 pages
Autobiography. Latino/a Studies. BAREFOOT HEART is a vividly told autobiographical account of the life of a child growing up in a family of migrant farm workers. Elva Trevino Hart was born in south Texas to Mexican immigrants and spent her childhood moving back and forth between Texas and Minnesota, eventually leaving that world to earn a master's degree in computer science/engineering. This is a
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Malcolm X, Alex Haley · 484 pages
Brown Girl Dreaming
Jacqueline Woodson · 368 pages
Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons and an Unlikely Road to Manhood
Ta-Nehisi Coates · 248 pages
An exceptional father-son story about the reality that tests us, the myths that sustain us, and the love that saves us.Paul Coates was an enigmatic god to his sons: a Vietnam vet who rolled with the Black Panthers, an old-school disciplinarian and new-age believer in free love, an autodidact who launched a publishing company in his basement dedicated to telling the true history of African civiliza
Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood
Ibtisam Barakat · 200 pages
Marzi
Marzena Sowa · 230 pages
Marzena Sowa's memoir of a childhood shaped by politics as told from a young girl's perspective. Structured as a series of vignettes that build on one another, MARZI is a coming-of-age story that portrays the harsh realities of life behind the Iron Curtain while maintaining the everyday wonders and curiosity of childhood.
The Dark Child
Camara Laye · 188 pages
"The Dark Child is a ... memoir of Camara Laye's youth in the village of Koroussa, French Guinea, a place steeped in mystery. Laye marvels over his mother's supernatural powers, his father's distinction as the village goldsmith, and his own passage into manhood. ... More than the autobiography of one boy, this is the universal story of sacred traditions struggling against the encroachment of a mod
The Best We Could Do
Thi Bui · 335 pages
The author describes her experiences as a young Vietnamese immigrant, highlighting her family's move from their war-torn home to the United States in graphic novel format.
The Art of Flying
Antonio Altarriba
Vietnamerica: A Family's Journey
G.B. Tran · 288 pages
A memoir in graphic novel format about the author's experiences as the son of Vietnamese immigrants who fled to America during the fall of Saigon describes how he learned his tragic ancestral history and the impact of the Vietnam War on his family while visiting their homeland years later.
Level Up
Gene Luen Yang, Thien Pham · 160 pages
Dennis, the son of Chinese immigrants, yearns to play video games like his friends and, upon his strict father's death, becomes obsessed with them but later, realizing how his father sacrificed for him, he chooses a nobler path.
Forget Sorrow: An Ancestral Tale
Belle Yang · 256 pages
"When Belle Yang was forced to take refuge in her parents' home after an abusive boyfriend began stalking her, her father entertained her with stories of old China. The history she'd ignored while growing up became a source of comfort and inspiration, and narrowed the gap separating her--an independent, Chinese-American woman--from her Old World Chinese parents. In Forget Sorrow, Yang makes her de
Turning Japanese
MariNaomi · 217 pages
Turning Japanese is an illustrated memoir that chronicles MariNaomi's experiences working in illegal hostess bars in San Jose and Tokyo while attempting to connect with a culture that had eluded her since childhood.
Drawing from Memory
Allen Say · 63 pages
"Caldecott Medalist Allen Say presents a stunning graphic novel chronicling his journey as an artist during WWII, when he apprenticed under Noro Shinpei, Japan's premier cartoonistDRAWING FROM MEMORY is Allen Say's own story of his path to becoming the renowned artist he is today. Shunned by his father, who didn't understand his son's artistic leanings, Allen was embraced by Noro Shinpei, Japan's
Kampung Boy
LAT (Mohammad Nor Khalid) · 141 pages