Best Books 2016 Publishers Weekly

The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye

Sonny Liew (Pantheon)

The history of Singapore and the history of comics are blended in this tour de force that follows the career of Charlie Chan Hock Chye, an imaginary Singaporean cartoonist. Liew mimics styles from manga to comics strips, as Chye tries to find his own voice while adapting to the shifting social and political climate.

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How to Survive in the North

Luke Healy (Nobrow)

In chapters that alternate between the fictional life of a dysfunctional contemporary academic and life on a ship during a very real, though doomed, 1922 Arctic expedition, Healy creates a moving literary commentary on survival. The emotional and heroic core is Ada Blackjack, the ship's indigenous seamstress; determined to return home, she struggles for two years to survive in a desolate landscape.

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March: Book Three

John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell (Top Shelf)

From the heinous 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., to the historic 1965 march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, March: Book Three, the concluding volume of Lewis's graphic memoir, documents the courageous and heroic struggle for racial justice in America. Vividly rendered and retold by Powell, this acclaimed trilogy is a milestone in nonfiction comics storytelling.

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The One Hundred Nights of Hero: A Graphic Novel

Isabel Greenberg (Little, Brown)

Set in the same world as Greenberg's acclaimed debut, An Encyclopedia of Early Earth, this collection of tales has the same powerful, dreamlike intensity. Using a woodcutlike style, the stories reconfigure legends and fables into a new cosmology that's familiar yet fresh, while spotlighting a pantheon of heroic and steadfast women.

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Rosalie Lightning: A Graphic Memoir

Tom Hart (St. Martin's)

The true story of the death of the author's two-year-old daughter is as heartrending a memoir as ever put to paper, refusing to rely on easy consolation, and ultimately refusing to let go of an irreplaceable life while creating a lasting memorial to her spirit. A book as painful as it is essential.

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