Esther's Notebooks

About Esther’s Notebooks

The hilarious, heartbreaking, and painfully true life of a girl growing up in Paris, from the acclaimed comic book artist and author of The Arab of the Future

“Funny, well-observed…contains immense daring and depth…Sattouf has drawn a portrait of a generation.” —Observer, “Graphic Novel of the Month”

Every week, the comic book artist Riad Sattouf has a chat with his friend’s 10-year old daughter, Esther.  She tells him about her life, her family, her school, her friends, her hopes, her dreams and her fears. And then he creates a one-page comic strip based on what she says.

This book is a collection of 156 of those strips, comprising the first three volumes as they appeared in Europe, spanning Esther’s life from age 10 to 12. 

As The Guardian noted: “Each page of Esther’s Notebooks is self-contained—there’s usually a neat punchline—but read them all, and you come to see that Sattouf has drawn a portrait of a generation: their hopes, dreams and cultural references; the way that their personalities, backgrounds—many of the children portrayed have parents who are immigrants—and preconceived ideas about sexuality begin to play out even before they’ve begun secondary school. The result is a bit like a cartoon version of Michael Apted’s landmark TV series, Up. These funny, well-observed comics are fantastically daring.”