Habibi

Craig Thompson's Habibi runs to more than six hundred pages and was published by Pantheon in September 2011. It is drawn in black and white, and the country it takes place in borrows the furniture of fairy tale.

At the centre of it are Dodola and Zam, two escaped child slaves whose lives are pulled apart and shaped again by the years in between. Both take on other names and other selves as they grow up, and the changes turn out to be obstacles rather than helps when the two of them finally find each other again.

Thompson describes the book as a love story and as a parable about the relationship between people and the natural world. Among its concerns are the divide between rich countries and poor ones and what Christianity and Islam hold in common, and it works by weaving together older stories, calligraphy and the visual language of the manuscript tradition. It was a New York Times best-seller in hardcover, and it also drew criticism for the way it handles sexuality and for its portrayal of the culture it borrows from.