Fatherland

By Nina Bunjevac. Published by Liveright. 

Hardcover, 160 pages, B&W, 2014

In 1975 Nina Bunjevac’s mother fled her marriage and her adopted country of Canada and took Nina back to Yugoslavia to live with her parents. Peter, her husband, was a fanatical Serbian nationalist who had been forced to leave his country at the end of World War II and migrate to Canada. But even there he continued his activities, joining a terrorist group that planned to set off bombs at the homes of Tito sympathisers and at Yugoslav missions in Canada and the USA. Then in 1977, while his family were still in Yugoslavia, a telegram arrived to say that a bomb had gone off prematurely and Peter and two of his comrades had been killed.

Nina Bunjevac tells her family’s story in superb black-and-white artwork. Fatherland will be recognised as a masterpiece of non-fiction comics, worthy to stand beside Persepolis and Palestine.

Ultimately, this is a beautiful, sad and necessary book — I only wish it were longer. – Anya Ulinich on Fatherland, New York Times

Bunjevac handles time brilliantly, and is marvellously succinct when it comes to historical facts, unpicking a complicated situation for the reader without ever bogging him down. But it’s her drawings that really lift Fatherland up. She works in monochrome, and uses cross-hatching and pointillist techniques, both of which give her strips the feeling of newsprint. This is history, then, but it’s also as vividly immediate as any headline. At a time when European nationalism is again terrifyingly on the march, no wonder it makes for such engrossing and salutary reading. – Rachel Cooke on Fatherland, The Guardian

Nina Bunjevac gives readers the impression of experiencing history untouched and direct, brought haltingly to life from the pages of textbooks, or the frames of newsreels. – Sean Rogers on Fatherland, Globe and Mail