Imagine Wanting Only This [Hardcover]

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Forbes •Lit Hub • Electric Lit

A gorgeous graphic memoir about loss, love, and confronting grief
 
When Kristen Radtke was in college, the sudden death of a beloved uncle and the sight of an abandoned mining town after his funeral marked the beginning moments of a lifelong fascination with ruins and with people and places left behind. Over time, this fascination deepened until it triggered a journey around the world in search of ruined places. Now, in this genre-smashing graphic memoir, she leads us through deserted cities in the American Midwest, an Icelandic town buried in volcanic ash, islands in the Philippines, New York City, and the delicate passageways of the human heart. Along the way, we learn about her family and a rare genetic heart disease that has been passed down through generations, and revisit tragic events in America’s past.

A narrative that is at once narrative and factual, historical and personal, Radtke’s stunning illustrations and piercing text never shy away from the big questions: Why are we here, and what will we leave behind?
 
(With black-and-white illustrations throughout; part of the Pantheon Graphic Novel series) This delicate, multi-layered mediation on memory, loss and the allure of abandoned spaces is an astonishingly sure-footed first work.... Radtke’s clear and earnest linework adds a dimension that elevates it above the standard 'young person’s memoir' genre, while bringing the narrative strengths of contemporary literary non-fiction to the graphic novel format.  —Forbes

“Radtke is, first and foremost, a superhuman of illustration, a grandmaster like Adrian Tomine or Chris Ware. . . . Close-ups of hands and faces alternate with expansive landscapes painted in delicate shades of gray, a ray from a flashlight pierces the night, birds swoop up into the sky in silhl³.