Patience

Description

Dan Clowes' most important graphic novel since Ghost World and David Boring Patience is an indescribable psychedelic science-fiction love story, veering with uncanny precision from violent destruction to deeply personal tenderness in a way that is both quintessentially 'Clowesian', and utterly unique in the author's body of work. This 180-page, full-colour story affords Clowes the opportunity to draw some of the most exuberant and breathtaking pages of his life, and to tell his most suspenseful, surprising and affecting story yet. The story opens in 2012, when Jack Barlow returns home to find Patience, his pregnant girlfriend, murdered. We meet him next in 2029, still haunted by the murder. He hears of a guy who thinks he's invented a device that enables time travel. On the next page Jack is in 2006, watching Patience on her dates with boys. Is one of them the killer?

Daniel Clowes was born in 1961. He is the creator of the comic books Eightball, Ghost World, which was made into a film by the director Terry Zwigoff, David Boring, and Ice Haven. His adaptation of his own Ghost World graphic novel for the screen earned him an Oscar nomination. A regular contributor to the New Yorker, McSweeney's, and The Best American Comics, he lives in California with his wife.

Patience is a new high watermark for the author, but also for the medium as a whole... Clowes is a singular voice, not just in comics but in American literature. * Independent * No cartoonist alive devotes as much effort as Daniel Clowes to mapping the differences between the way people see themselves and the way they really are... Clowes's work is characterized by such technical perfection and well-calibrated acidity... Clowes's new book, Patience, is an enormous undertaking, not just in length but visually and in narrative scope. -- Sam Thielman * Guardian * Clowes does realism impeccably...but he is also fond of letting the irruption of the hyperreal or fantastical not so much shift gears as change the entire vehicle... This is a deeply affecting book...its sustained undertow of tenderness and melancholy giving it a surprising delicacy. -- Neel Mukherjee * Guardian * Clowes' drawings are as uncompromisingly honest and deadpan as ever, and the twists towards the end are expertly plotted, making Patience a brilliant addition to his great body of work. -- Doug Johnstone * Big Issue * A naturalistic feel and the confidence that many contemporary fiction writers try to achieve... It's a time-travelling love story by a beautiful, twisted genius. * Vice Magazine * Clowes mixes retro-styled visuals with eye-poppingly colourful surrealism and although it has the pace of a thriller, it's also soaked in a feeling of helplessness as its characters struggle to control the world in which they live. * Metro * Patience by Daniel Clowes is the NEXT great book you are going to read... But this book is so good it should cross over into the arena of those who don't normally partake of books in which images and words intersect... read this, fall in love with its majesty... Don't miss out. * Bookmunch * Tender and heartfelt, exciting and bizarre, Patience is interested above all in the stories we tell ourselves about love. -- Rachel Cook * Observer * As the time travel escalates the book heads towards entropy, gripping us to the very last panel and reminding us just why Clowes is held in such high regard. This is an essential purchase. -- Pete Redrup * Quietus * Creating weird worlds, subverting genres and confounding expectations is what Clowes does best. -- Tim Noakes * Dazed Digital *