The Complete Maus

Art Spiegelman's account of his father Vladek's survival, drawn with Jews as mice, Germans as cats and Poles as pigs, won a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992, the first for a graphic novel. It is nonfiction in comics form: Vladek's testimony runs alongside the prickly relationship between father and son decades later in Rego Park, so the book is also about what survival cost the next generation. The complete edition gathers both volumes, serialized in Raw from 1980 to 1991. A strong first choice for readers who find prose testimony hard going, and a lasting one for anyone interested in how memory gets handed down.