On sale date: April 4, 2016
A love story told elliptically in stunning watercolors.
Winner of the prestigious Grand Prize of the 2010 Angouleme Comics Festival, 5,000 Kilometers Per Second tells—or almost tells—the love story between Piero and Lucia, which begins with a casual glance exchanged by teenagers across the street through a window and ends with a last, desperate hook-up between two older, sadder one-time lovers. Executed in stunning watercolors and broken down into five chapters (set in Italy, Norway, Egypt, and Italy again), 5,000 Kilometers Per Second manages to refer to Piero and Lucia's actual love story only obliquely, focusing instead on its first stirrings and then episodes in their life during which they are separated—a narrative twist that makes it even more poignant and heart-wrenching. 5,000 Kilometers Per Second is another delicate graphic-novel masterpiece from Europe.
Praise
"In an intricate, watery-inked style, Fior, also an architect, has an equally deft hand for the concrete and the conceptual... A prize-winner when it was first published in Italy in 2011, this is a must-have for collections serving enthusiastic graphic novel readerships." — Annie Bostrom - Booklist
"Fior's presentation of love is a mature one, and the book is like one of those moments a person has when they are older and gain a clear vision of how little they actually knew when they were younger." — Comics Beat
"The way that Manuele Fior paces and controls the flow of the story is glorious. Be ready for some heartbreak along the way and an ending you might not necessarily expect, but it's an emotional journey that's well worth making."" — Grovel
"This story is full of unadulterated emotion, as stingingly sad as it is deeply hopeful." — Publishers Weekly
"Fior's use of watercolour is a perfect choice of medium giving the characters a fluid and spontaneous sense of movement, while subtly depicting the emotional spectrum developed throughout the book." — Quietus
Specs
- Pages
- 144
- Format
- Hardback
- Color
- Full-color
- Dimensions
- 6.9" × 9.6"
- ISBN-13
- 9781606996669