IRMINA
Written and Drawn by: Barbara Yelin
UK Release: 27 January 2023
Published by SelfMadeHero
US Sales & Distro by Abrams Books • UK Sales & Distro Abrams & Chronicle Books
288pp Paperback • Colour • US $22.99 / CAN $28.99 • UK £16.99 • ISBN: 978-1-914224-133
(First published in hardback in 2016.)
Barbara Yelin’s award winning IRMINA re-released
for Holocaust Memorial Day – 27 January 2023
Since its hardback release in 2016, the graphic novel Irmina has garnered praise and prizes from around the world. SelfMadeHero launches the paperback edition to tie in with Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January 2023.
Studying in London, Irmina meets Howard, one of Oxford University’s first Black students. They fall in love, but as events in Germany escalate, Irmina’s circumstances change and she is forced to return to Berlin. At first she continues to write to Howard, but his silence leaves her with little choice but to adapt to life in Nazi Germany. Forty years later, Irmina’s past catches up with her – and she is given a vision of a life that might have been. Irmina is a moving and perceptive drama about the tension between integrity and social advancement, reflecting on the complicity that results from choice, conscious or otherwise, to look away. It raises poignant questions about human attitudes towards suffering and our response to violence.
Multi-award winning German comic book artist Barbara Yelin weaves her family history into a broader narrative of Germany’s past and in doing so attempts to understand how one was shaped by the other. While keeping the emotional intensity of human relationships at the heart of the story, Yelin creates an atmospheric sense of place with her detailed depictions of London, Oxford,
Berlin and Barbados.
About Author
