Aya: Life in Yop City

by Clément Oubrerie, Helge Dascher (Translator), Marguerite Abouet, Marguerite Abouet & Clément Oubrerie

Overview

Experience the award-winning series about independent young women growing up in 1970s Ivory Coast

Ivory Coast, 1978. It's a golden time, and the nation, too-an oasis of affluence and stability in West Africa-seems fueled by something wondrous. Aya is loosely based upon Marguerite Abouet's youth in Yop City. It is the story of the studious and clear-sighted nineteen-year-old Aya, her easygoing friends Adjoua and Bintou, and their meddling relatives and neighbors. It's a wryly funny, breezy account of the simple pleasures and private troubles of everyday life in Yop City.

Clément Oubrerie's warm colors and energetic, playful line connect expressively with Marguerite Abouet's vibrant writing. This reworked edition offers readers the chance to immerse themselves in Abouet's Yop City, bringing together the first three volumes of the series in Book One. Drawn & Quarterly will release volumes four through six of the original French series (as yet unpublished in English) in Book Two. Aya is the winner of the Best First Album award at the Angoulême International Comics Festival, the Children's Africana Book Award, and the Glyph Award; was nominated for the Quill Award, the YALSA's Great Graphic Novels list, and the Eisner Award; and was included on "best of" lists from The Washington Post, Booklist, Publishers Weekly, and School Library Journal.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781770460829
Publisher:	Drawn & Quarterly
Publication date:	09/04/2012
Series:	Aya
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	791,888
Product dimensions:	8.30(w) x 5.90(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Marguerite Abouet was born in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, in 1971. At the age of twelve, she was sent with her older brother to study in France under the care of a great uncle. She lives in Romainville, a suburb of Paris, where she works as a legal assistant and writes novels she has yet to show to publishers. Aya is her first comic. It taps into Abouet’s childhood memories of Ivory Coast in the 1970s, a prosperous, promising time in that country’s history, to tell an unpretentious and gently humorous story of an Africa we rarely see―spirited, hopeful, and resilient.

Clément Oubrerie was born in Paris in 1966. After a stint in art school he spent two years in the United States doing a variety of odd jobs, publishing his first children’s books and serving jail time in New Mexico for working without papers. Back in France, he went on to a prolific career in illustration. With over forty children’s books to his credit, he is also cofounder of the 3D animation studio Station OMD. A drummer in a funk band in his spare time, he still travels frequently, especially to the Ivory Coast. In Aya, his first comic, Oubrerie’s warm colors and energetic, playful line connect expressively with Marguerite Abouet’s vibrant writing.

Editorial Reviews

Oubrerie's style animates both the broadly funny and painfully grave moments in Abouet's rhythmic slice-of-life storytelling.” —The Washington Post

“Marguerite Abouet's comic tells of a lost age, a time in the late 1970s when the Ivory Coast was basking in the glow of an economic boom, when disco seeped from the open air clubs in Abidjan and teenage girls such as Aya, Adjoua and Bintou were able to enjoy one last flirtatious summer before adulthood . . . Abouet's is a gentle, nostalgic account.” —Craig Taylor, The Guardian

From the Publisher