![]() ![]() ![]() This is a routine operation, but when he wakes up, he has stitches from ear to chest, and only one vocal cord he can no longer speak in anything but a whisper. Aged 14, he goes into hospital to have a cyst removed from his neck. Small is an award-winning illustrator of children's books, but his own childhood was neither blissful nor – to quote Larkin again – a forgotten boredom. If this isn't the definition of a satisfying literary experience, I don't know what is. And yet it can be read in just a little over an hour. It is subtle its characters are beautifully worked it makes deft use of metaphor and simile. ![]() A moving story about the way man hands on misery to man, it also captures, seemingly effortlessly, the repression and double standards of the 1950s. Now out from the same publisher in the UK, it is a wonderful thing. A nyone yet to be convinced by the grand claims made for graphic novels by people like me should look at David Small's Stitches, a memoir which, when it came out in the US last year, was shortlisted for a National Book Award. ![]()
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