Nick Drnaso's Sabrina is the best book—in any medium—I have read about our current moment. It is a masterpiece, beautifully written and drawn, possessing all the political power of polemic and yet simultaneously all the delicacy of truly great art. It scared me. I loved it.
Zadie Smith
$32.95 CAD/$27.95 USD
Conspiracy theories, breakdown, murder.
Everything’s gonna be all right. Until it isn’t.
How many hours of sleep did you get last night? Rate your overall mood from 1 to 5, 1 being poor. Rate your stress level from 1 to 5, 5 being severe. Are you experiencing depression or thoughts of suicide? Is there anything in your personal life that is affecting your duty?
When Sabrina disappears, an airman in the U.S. Air Force is drawn into a web of suppositions, wild theories, and outright lies. He reports to work every night in a bare, sterile fortress that serves as no protection from a situation that threatens the sanity of Teddy, his childhood friend and boyfriend of the missing woman. Sabrina's grieving sister Sandra struggles to fill her days waiting in purgatory. After a videotape surfaces, we see devastation through a cinematic lens, as true tragedy is distorted when fringe thinkers and conspiracy theorists begin to interpret events to fit their own narratives.
The follow-up to Nick Drnaso’s LA Times Book Prize winning Beverly, Sabrina depicts a modern world devoid of personal interaction and responsibility, where relationships are stripped of intimacy through glowing computer screens. An indictment of our modern state, Drnaso contemplates the dangers of a fake news climate. Timely and articulate, Sabrina leaves you gutted, searching for meaning in the aftermath of disaster.
Praise for Sabrina
Sabrina is an artful masterwork, easily already one of the top books of the summer and demanding to be read.
Under The Radar
Nick Drnaso's Sabrina is full of ominous, dead-quiet catastrophe. The faces of his stoic characters are as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa's, as they confront modern terror with blank, fathomless smirks. Never sentimental or satirical (we've all had enough of that), Drnaso chronicles the American climate of fear, isolation, mainstream misinformation, and fringe paranoia with perfect lucidity. Sabrina steeps the mundane in shadowy mystery and grand tragedy; fans of Chris Ware, Todd Solondz, and Don DeLillo should read this immediately.
Tony Tulathimutte
Nick Drnaso is one of the most ambitious, singular cartoonists to emerge in recent years, and his dedication to novelistic fiction is an inspiration. Incisive, chilling, and completely unpredictable, Sabrina demonstrates the inexplicable power of comics at their best.
Adrian Tomine, Killing and Dying
Reading Sabrina is an experience akin to watching a movie. It’s as if the lights have gone down: absorbed and gripped, the skin prickles.
The Guardian
This is a political powerhouse of a graphic novel. Sabrina is the next bound for a cartoonist that will undoubtedly be considered one of the greats of all-time.
The Comics Journal
Drnaso’s simple, rigid drawings capture the bleak blankness of much contemporary life, anomie hovering over almost every interaction, both real and virtual... [Sabrina] leaves the audience holding its breath.
The Chicago Tribune
This maestro of minimalism manages to convey the horror of senseless murder with nothing but a lumpy sheet and motionless red water in a bathtub.
NPR
A profoundly American nightmare... The fictional killing in Sabrina is disturbing, but Drnaso doesn’t fixate on the gore or the culprit; he’s more concerned with how the public claims and consumes it, spinning out morbid fantasies with impunity... It’s a shattering work of art
New York Times
Nick Drnaso uses stoic illustrations of life along the periphery to investigate the American experience of fear and loneliness. This is a book you won’t forget.
Lit Hub
Almost sure to be one of the most discussed graphic novels of the year—if not the next several, this should skyrocket Drnaso to the top tier of comics creators today.
Library Journal Reviews
Sabrina is startling. Drnaso's formal ingenuity and confidence is matched by the acuity and depth of the story's awareness of who and where we are right now.Jonathan Lethem
Drnaso depicts an indictment of our modern state – a world devoid of personal interaction, responsibility and intimacy – and contemplates the dangers of a fake news climate.
Globe & Mail's Most Anticipated Books of the First Half of 2018
Sabrina is an astonishing tour-de-force that simmers with quiet, unresolved dread.
Gizmodo
When we look back on the serious cultural products of this stretch of history where media has made everyone crazy and driven a wedge between our public selves and our private humanity, Sabrina is likely to be a touchstone.
Forbes
Loneliness and madness are timeless, but Sabrina, in its exploration of personal fears, is a precise time capsule of how desperate and deranged 2018 can make any of us.
The Chicago Reader
[Sabrina] is an astonishing meditation on the anxiety of post-9/11 America.
Chicago Magazine
Part Don DeLillo, part Jim Jarmusch, all fridge-humming domesticity and quiet dread.
British GQ
[Sabrina is] a masterful look at the emotional toll taken by the dehumanizing forces at large in modern society.
Booklist
