Sabrina

by Nick Drnaso

Overview

The FIRST GRAPHIC NOVEL NOMINATED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE!

Conspiracy theories, breakdown, murder.
Eveythinng's gonna be all right. Until it isn't.

How many hours of sleep did you get last night? Rate your overall mood from 1 to 5, 1 being poor. Rate your stress level from 1 to 5, 5 being severe. Are you experiencing depression or thoughts of suicide? Is there anything in your personal life that is affecting your duty?

When Sabrina disappears, an airman in the U.S. Air Force is drawn into a web of suppositions, wild theories, and outright lies. He reports to work every night in a bare, sterile fortress that serves as no protection from a situation that threatens the sanity of Teddy, his childhood friend and boyfriend of the missing woman. Sabrina's grieving sister Sandra struggles to fill her days waiting in purgatory. After a videotape surfaces, we see devastation through a cinematic lens, as true tragedy is distorted when fringe thinkers and conspiracy theorists begin to interpret events to fit their own narratives.

The follow-up to Nick Drnaso’s LA Times Book Prize winning Beverly, Sabrina depicts a modern world devoid of personal interaction and responsibility, where relationships are stripped of intimacy through glowing computer screens. An indictment of our modern state, Drnaso contemplates the dangers of a fake news climate. Timely and articulate, Sabrina leaves you gutted, searching for meaning in the aftermath of disaster.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781770463165
Publisher:	Drawn & Quarterly
Publication date:	05/22/2018
Pages:	204
Sales rank:	389,167
Product dimensions:	7.90(w) x 9.60(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	16 Years

About the Author

Nick Drnaso was born in 1989 in Palos Hills, Illinois. His debut graphic novel, Beverly, received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Graphic Novel. He has contributed to several comics anthologies, self-published a handful of comics, been nominated for three Ignatz Awards, and coedited the second and third issues of Linework, Columbia College’s annual comic anthology. Drnaso lives in Chicago, where he works as a cartoonist and illustrator.

Editorial Reviews

…Drnaso has topped his virtuoso 2016 debut, Beverly, which had a cheerful palette gleefully at odds with all that roiled beneath its speckless Midwestern skies…Some of the visual shocks in Beverly lodge in the head, like certain demonic glimpses from The Shining—but Sabrina goes deeper, risks more. It's an unnerving mystery told by a rigorous moralist, a profoundly American nightmare set squarely in the first year of the Trump presidency. Politics is never mentioned, but the dread is everywhere…With his fluid framing…[Drnaso] dictates information delivery, allowing the mind to breathe. His drawing style is at once poetically attuned to details of neighborhoods and interiors…and deceptively plain when it comes to the people who inhabit them…[Sabrina is] a shattering work of art.

The New York Times Book Review - Ed Park

01/08/2018
In this graphic novel from a rising star in the indie comics scene, a young woman vanishes, leaving behind her grieving sister and lover. But this coolly despairing narrative focuses on a character only tangentially connected to the incident: Calvin, a divorced, sleeved-blanket-wearing Air Force technician who was friends with the boyfriend in high school. When Calvin agrees to let his old friend crash at his place, he becomes the target of vague, hostile conspiracy theories spread by internet cranks and late-night radio hosts. Like Drnaso’s debut, Beverly, the small, precise dramas of Midwestern suburban life are positioned against a larger canvas of contemporary paranoia, rumor-mongering, and violence. The art is characterized by simplified, blocky figures moving though meticulously measured geometric settings—Drnaso wears the influence of Chris Ware on his sleeve. But these comics are much talkier; interstitial, small square panels are filled with blocks of dialogue. The result is a well-crafted, if often frustratingly distant, indie drama, as if Drnaso is reluctant to let too much messy emotion into his careful dioramas. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"Nick Drnaso's Sabrina is the best book—in any medium—I have read about our current moment. It is a masterpiece, beautifully written and drawn, possessing all the political power of polemic and yet simultaneously all the delicacy of truly great art. It scared me. I loved it."—Zadie Smith

"Sabrina is startling. Drnaso's formal ingenuity and confidence is matched by the acuity and depth of the story's awareness of who and where we are right now."—Jonathan Lethem

"Nick Drnaso is one of the most ambitious, singular cartoonists to emerge in recent years, and his dedication to novelistic fiction is an inspiration. Incisive, chilling, and completely unpredictable, Sabrina demonstrates the inexplicable power of comics at their best."—Adrian Tomine

“[Sabrina] is a Midwestern gothic tale for our times… A shattering work of art.”—The New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year

“Sabrina is not only a step forward for comic strip literary fiction, but a book that shows, as well as tells, the slippery horrors of our post-truth reality.”—The Guardian Best Books of 2018

“It's a chilling distillation of the way the world feels nowadays.”—NPR’s Best Books of 2018

"Drnaso’s simple, rigid drawings capture the bleak blankness of much contemporary life, anomie hovering over almost every interaction, both real and virtual... [Sabrina] leaves the audience holding its breath."—Kathleen Rooney, The Chicago Tribune

From the Publisher

★ 06/01/2018
In Drnaso's enthralling sophomore effort (after the acclaimed Beverly), a woman named Sabrina vanishes from her Chicago apartment, leaving friends and family haunted by what might have befallen her. Unable to cope, her boyfriend Teddy takes refuge with his childhood friend Calvin, a U.S. Air Force airman struggling with the end of his marriage. When Sabrina's horrific fate is finally revealed, our cast find themselves at the center of a news cycle quickly warped by a paranoid, apocalyptic radio host and his legion of online supporters who refuse to believe the official story. Cinematic and deeply timely, this tale is torn from today's darkest headlines of fake news, terrorism, and the ultimately dehumanizing effect of the Internet. Drnaso's artwork seems basic at a glance, but page to page, panel to panel it reveals depths of emotion that culminate in a reading experience guaranteed to linger. VERDICT More indictment of modern life than satire, and almost sure to be one of the most discussed graphic novels of the year—if not the next several, this should skyrocket Drnaso to the top tier of comics creators today.—TB

Library Journal