Misery of Love

Title: Misery of Love
Author: Yvan Alagbé
Comics & Graphic Novels: 1699482
ISBN: 9781681379180
Publisher: New York Review Comics
Published: 2025
Binding: Paperback
Language: English
Number of Pages: 232
Section: Comics & Graphic Novels | Literary
Condition Note: New from the publisher
Publisher Description: Colonial history haunts this stunning, spectral-looking graphic novel, a spiritual sequel to the author's Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures.

In Misery of Love, a spiritual sequel to the acclaimed Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures, Yvan Alagbé continues his unflinching interrogation of race and family in modern France.

The book focuses on the dream-like memories of a woman named Clare, who is reluctantly spending time with her relatives for a funeral. Alagbé seamlessly glides between narratives of the family's past and present, all haunted by the legacy of France's colonial subjugation of Africa.

Alagbé works in stormy grayscale washes, using comics, as he puts it, as "a sacred dimension which celebrates, questions and perpetuates life.... I believe that life is not damnation but grace."

Told through time shifts that echo Richard McGuire's Here, Misery of Love is another ambitious, devastating masterpiece from one of France's best contemporary graphic novelists.