The Reading Warehouse

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Alan's War creator Emmanuel Guibert combines photos and narrative art to tell the story of photojournalist Didier Lefevre's travels in Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders.

In 1986, Afghanistan was torn apart by a war between the Soviet Union and the Mujahidin. Didier Lefevre was a photojournalist who accompanied a Doctors Without Borders team on a mission at the height of the war. In the company of an arms caravan, Lefevre and the doctors climbed across arid mountain passes to reach a tiny hut deep in the war zone, which would serve as a field hospital.

This is Didier's story, in his own words, with his own photographs. Through his camera, we witnesses humanity at every extreme--violence, despair, generosity, and heroism--against the backdrop of the vast, barren Afghan landscape. Emmanuel Guibert has combined Lefevre's unflinching photography with his own spare, expressive illustrations to achieve a visual memoir that challenges the mind and strikes at the heart.

As the consequences of that war continue to reverberate in the region, The Photographer focuses on some of its true heroes: the doctors who risk death to save lives and mend the wounds of war.

Emmanuel Guibert has written a great many graphic novels for readers young and old, among them the Sardine in Outer Space series and The Professor's Daughter with Joann Sfar.

In 1994, a chance encounter with an American World War II veteran named Alan Cope marked the beginning of a deep friendship and the birth of a great biographical epic.

Another of Guibert's recent works is The Photographer. Showered with awards, translated around the world and soon to come from First Second books, it relates a Doctors Without Borders mission in 1980's Afghanistan through the eyes of a great reporter, the late Didier Lefèvre.

Guibert lives in Paris with his wife and daughter.