Stitches (WW Norton & Co)

David Small, the prize-winning children's author, depicts a childhood from hell in this searing yet redemptive graphic memoir. One day Small awoke from a supposedly harmless operation to discover that he had been transformed into a virtual mute. A vocal cord removed, his throat slashed and stitched together like a bloody boot, the fourteen-year-old boy had not been told that he had throat cancer and was expected to die. Small re-creates a life story that might have been imagined żeby Kafka. Readers will be riveted by his journey from speechless victim, subjected to X-rays aby his radiologist father and scolded by his withholding and tormented mother, to his decision to flee his home at sixteen with nothing more than dreams of becoming an artist. Recalling Running with Scissors with its ability to evoke the trauma of a childhood lost, Stitches will transform adolescent and adult readers alike with its deeply liberating vision.