Alpha
Abidjan to Paris
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- $24.99
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
Doctors Without Borders Prize
PEN Promotes Award
GLLI (Global Literature in Libraries Initiative) Translated YA Book Prize Shortlist
CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal Longlist
Library Journal “Best Book of the Year” selection
School Library Journal “Best Adult Book 4 Teens” selection
Comics Journal “Best Comic of the Year” selection
“Barroux’s raw illustrations and Bessora’s matter-of-fact text express the inhumanity at the heart of the refugee crisis.” —School Library Journal “Best Adult Book 4 Teens” citation
Alpha's wife and son left Côte d'Ivoire months ago to join his sister-in-law in Paris, but Alpha has heard nothing from them since. With a visa, Alpha's journey to reunite with his family would take a matter of hours. Without one, he is adrift for over a year, encountering human traffickers in the desert, refugee camps in northern Africa, overcrowded boats carrying migrants between the Canary Islands and Europe's southern coast, and an unforgettable cast of fellow travelers lost and found along the way. Throughout, Alpha stays the course, carrying his loved ones' photograph close to his heart as he makes his perilous trek across continents.
Featuring emotive, full-color artwork created in felt-tip pen and wash, Alpha is an international award–winning graphic novel supported by Amnesty International that received the PEN Promotes Award and Doctors Without Borders Prize, and was longlisted for the CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal. The U.S. edition is sponsored by Le Korsa, a nonprofit organization devoted to improving human lives in Senegal.
Bessora is an award-winning writer of Swiss, German, French, Polish, and Gabonese heritage whose work has been anthologized in Best European Fiction.
Barroux is a French graphic artist who spent much of his childhood in North Africa and whose illustrations have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Forbes.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A migrant's harrowing journey to follow his wife and son to Paris from C te d'Ivoire unfolds in an illustrated narrative that reveals the difficult existences of African migrants. The reason for Alpha's family's flight isn't clear; though he says of C te d'Ivoire, "if you stay here, you'll be dead," he does not explain the danger more specifically. After being denied a French visa, Alpha travels illicitly across desert borders and then earns money for passage across the Mediterranean by working in camps and villages in Mali. Along the way, he collects a makeshift traveling family: a youth who dreams of playing professional soccer, a young sex worker, and a small boy who is on his own. Alpha strives to keep this group together all the way to the Moroccan coast, but the dangers along the way make separation inevitable. The impressionistic watercolor marker renderings of characters and settings convey mood, but the people and places are just as blurry and unsolid as Alpha's dreamlike narrative. Solidity comes in the end in the form of a third-person epilogue, which abruptly concludes the story. Though the volume doesn't give easy answers and would have benefitted from a bit more story detail, it nonetheless movingly depicts Alpha's challenging passage.
