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The Complete Maus: A Survivor's Tale (1997)
Published
Won: Special Pulitzer Prize, 1992.
The Pulitzer board honored Art Spiegelman's account of his father's survival of Auschwitz with a special award rather than a prize in one of its book categories. That awkwardness is the point: it is the moment a major American literary institution admitted a comic could stand among its books, without yet knowing where to put it. Read the two volumes together in this complete edition, since the frame story of Spiegelman interviewing his father in Queens matters as much as the wartime chapters. Its mice-and-cats device sounds glib until you meet it on the page, where it becomes a constant reminder of how people were sorted and labeled.
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Jimmy Corrigan (1999)
6.9/10on Open Library
Published
Won: Guardian First Book Award, 2001; also an American Book Award.
The first graphic novel to win a major British literary prize, and it beat prose debuts to do it. Chris Ware follows lonely, middle-aged Jimmy as he meets the father who abandoned him, with a parallel story of Jimmy's grandfather at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. The pages are dense, tiny and precisely designed, so this rewards a slow reader with good light rather than a commute. Expect melancholy more than plot; its power is in how much feeling Ware packs into small silent panels.
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Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006)
Published
Shortlisted: National Book Critics Circle Award, autobiography, 2006.
Alison Bechdel's memoir of growing up in a family funeral business, and of the closeted father whose death she spends the book trying to read, earned its place among prose memoirs on the critics' shortlist and topped Time's books of the year. It is the most literary book here in the plainest sense: it argues with Proust, Joyce and Fitzgerald as it goes, and each chapter circles back over the same events with new knowledge. If you only read memoir in prose, start with this one.
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American Born Chinese (2006)
Published
Shortlisted: National Book Award for Young People's Literature, 2006. Won: Michael L. Printz Award, 2007.
Gene Luen Yang's book was the first graphic novel to reach a National Book Award shortlist, and then the first to win the Printz, the American Library Association's top prize for young adult literature. Three stories braid together: the Monkey King of Chinese legend, a boy who is the only Chinese American kid at his school, and a sitcom-style cousin built from every ugly stereotype. The braid pays off in a twist that makes the uncomfortable parts land. It is short, funny and an easy first graphic novel for a teenager or an adult.
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The Arrival (2006)
9.6/10on Open Library
Published
Won: Book of the Year, NSW Premier's Literary Awards, 2007.
A book with no words at all took the overall prize at one of Australia's leading literary awards. Shaun Tan's wordless graphic novel follows a man who leaves his family to build a life in a strange new country, where the writing, the animals and even the buildings are invented, so the reader feels the immigrant's confusion firsthand. Its sepia pages look like an old photo album. Allow an hour and read it slowly; it works as well for adults as for the teenagers it is often given to.
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Dotter of Her Father's Eyes (2012)
Published
Won: Costa Biography Award, 2012.
The first graphic work to win a Costa Award, in a year when the Costa judges shortlisted two graphic novels. Mary Talbot sets her own childhood with a cold, Joyce-obsessed scholar father beside the life of Lucia Joyce, James Joyce's daughter, whose ambitions as a dancer were thwarted. Bryan Talbot's art shifts palette between the two timelines, so you always know where you are. It is a quiet, sharp book about fathers and daughters, and a good choice for readers who come to it through Joyce rather than through comics.
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Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? (2014)
8.8/10on Open Library
Published
Won: National Book Critics Circle Award, autobiography, 2014. Shortlisted: National Book Award for Nonfiction, 2014.
Eight years after Fun Home reached the critics' autobiography shortlist, a graphic memoir won the prize outright, and it took the first Kirkus Prize for nonfiction as well. New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast draws her aging parents' last years in their Brooklyn apartment, mixing cartoons, handwritten pages and photographs of the clutter they left behind. It is very funny and then, without warning, devastating. Anyone caring for an elderly parent will recognize the paperwork, the guilt and the arguments about moving.
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This One Summer (2014)
Published
Won: Governor General's Literary Award, children's literature (illustration), 2014. Honors: Caldecott Honor and Printz Honor, 2015.
The first graphic novel the Caldecott committee ever honored, and a Governor General's winner for Jillian Tamaki's art in Canada. Cousins Mariko and Jillian Tamaki follow Rose through a lakeside summer as her parents' marriage strains and the local teenagers' dramas spill into view. Jillian's blue-ink drawings carry the long, wordless stretches of a vacation when nothing and everything happens. Despite the Caldecott, a prize for picture books, this is a frank teenage story that suits readers of about thirteen and up, and adults.
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The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye (2016)
Published
Won: Singapore Literature Prize, English fiction, 2016.
The first graphic novel to win the prize's English fiction category, and a win with an edge: Singapore's National Arts Council had withdrawn a publishing grant the year before, saying the book's retelling of history could undermine the government's authority. Sonny Liew invents a forgotten Singaporean cartoonist and presents his life's work, drawn in a succession of period styles, as a way to retell the country's political history through the people who lost its arguments. Readers who enjoy books like Nabokov's Pale Fire, where the fiction hides inside a fake scholarly frame, will find a comics equivalent here.
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March. Book Three (2016)
8.5/10on Open Library
Published
Won: National Book Award for Young People's Literature, 2016; Michael L. Printz Award, Coretta Scott King Author Award and Sibert Medal, 2017.
The first book to win both the National Book Award and the Printz, and the moment the trilogy's run of honors peaked. Congressman John Lewis tells his own civil rights story with co-writer Andrew Aydin and artist Nate Powell, and this final volume covers the Freedom Summer of 1964 and the march from Selma. Start with Book One if you can; the trilogy works as one long memoir. Powell's black-and-white art makes the violence on the Edmund Pettus Bridge hard to look at, as it should be.
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Sabrina (2018)
7.5/10on Open Library
Published
Longlisted: Booker Prize, 2018.
The first graphic novel ever to make the Booker longlist, which made it the surprise of that year's announcement. Nick Drnaso's story starts with a young woman's disappearance and spends most of its pages on what comes after: the grief of the people closest to her, and the online rumors and conspiracy theories that swallow the case. His flat, almost expressionless figures can feel cold at first, but the restraint is what makes it chilling. It reads more like a quiet contemporary novel than a thriller, and it has aged uncomfortably well.
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New Kid (2019)
7.5/10on Open Library
Published
Won: Kirkus Prize, young readers' literature, 2019; Newbery Medal and Coretta Scott King Author Award, 2020.
The first graphic novel to win the Newbery Medal, the American Library Association's top prize for children's literature. Jerry Craft's seventh grader Jordan wants art school but lands at a wealthy private school where he is one of very few students of color, and the book's gentle, sharp comedy comes from the small slights he learns to name. It suits readers from about ten up, and adults who share it with them will laugh as often. Class Act continues the story with Jordan's friend Drew.
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Still Alive (2022)
Published
Won: Book of the Year and the Multicultural NSW Award, NSW Premier's Literary Awards, 2022.
The second graphic novel to take the NSW overall prize, fifteen years after Shaun Tan's The Arrival, and a debut at that. Safdar Ahmed spent close to a decade visiting Sydney's Villawood detention center, where he helped run art workshops for detained refugees and asylum seekers, and this book grew out of a webcomic he made from those visits. It records the detainees' stories, drawings and self-harm without sensationalism, alongside Ahmed's own doubts as a visitor who can leave. It is heavy reading, but the most direct book here about a policy argument still running.
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A First Time for Everything (2023)
Published
Won: National Book Award for Young People's Literature, 2023.
A graphic memoir won the category outright in a year when a second graphic novel, Huda Fahmy's Huda F Cares?, was also among the five finalists, a sign of how ordinary comics had become on that shortlist. Dan Santat, best known for picture books, recalls the three-week European tour in the summer of 1989 that pulled him out of a miserable middle school life, from first crushes to first real independence. It is warm, self-deprecating and generously drawn. Hand it to a teenager about to travel without their family for the first time.
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Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands (2022)
Published
Won: Canada Reads, 2023; Jan Michalski Prize for Literature, 2024.
The first comic to win Canada Reads, and the first graphic novel to win the Swiss Jan Michalski Prize, an international award where earlier graphic novels, Chris Ware's Building Stories among them, never got past the first round. Kate Beaton, best known for the comic strip Hark! A Vagrant, went west from Cape Breton to pay off student loans in the Alberta oil sands, and this memoir records the isolation, the money and the misogyny of camps where women were badly outnumbered. It is long and patient rather than shocking, and Beaton never lets anyone off easily, herself included. Pair it with Fun Home for the two strongest graphic memoirs here.
More about Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands16
Cannon (2025)
Published
Won: Stella Prize, 2026. Shortlisted: Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, 2026.
The first graphic novel to win Australia's Stella Prize in its 14-year history, and a finalist the same spring for the US$150,000 Carol Shields Prize, which went to Julia Elliott's Hellions. Lee Lai's Cannon is the dependable one: she cooks in a restaurant kitchen, looks after her grandfather and props up her best friend Trish, until the strain starts to show. The judges called it a portrait of a fracturing friendship between two queer, second-generation Chinese women. Lai's loose, expressive drawing leaves a lot unsaid, which is exactly how this kind of friendship breaks.
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Nowhere (2026)
Published
Shortlisted: Amazon Canada First Novel Award, 2026.
The first graphic novel to reach the shortlist in the award's 50-year history; the prize itself went to Maria Reva's Endling. Jon Claytor's debut is a darkly funny coming-of-age story set in a tiny town where monsters are simply part of life: zombies, vampires in therapy and depressed clowns. It is the newest book here and the oddest, a good pick for readers who like their small-town novels with a strong dose of the surreal.
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