Bye Bye Babylon by Lamia Ziade

This is a book that starts with a contention that seems unusual to our ears: Beirut in the 1970s is a paradise. Author Lamia Ziade was 7 years old in 1975, and this graphic novel of sorts begins with the drawings of the Western brand names that she fetishised as a child. But this quickly changes to detailed but succinct descriptions of guns, as Beirut became a far more dangerous place indeed. Now, as this is a graphic novel about a young woman growing up in the Middle East, you can’t help but to compare it to Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. And that is worth doing, if only to acknowledge what a groundbreaking book Satrapi’s was, but Bye Bye Babylon has a style of its own. This is most noticeable in the way that it can’t really be described as sequential art – there aren’t panels and page layouts as such, and text and drawings aren’t really integrated. Instead blocks of text are followed by pages of drawings which illustrate what the text refers to. It’s an odd approach, but somehow suitable, like looking at the scrapbook of someone struggling to survive. This book has an a odd focus, but it's worthwhile. [David Agnew]