Hostage

In 1997, Christophe André was working in Chechnya for Doctors Without Borders when armed men kidnapped him. Based on André's firsthand account, prize-winning cartoonist Delisle's (Jerusalem: Chronicle from the Holy City) work depicts the entire ordeal, as André is held in solitary confinement with almost no contact with the outside world for three months. This may be the most suspenseful book you'll ever read in which very little happens—André spends most of his days ruminating on his kidnappers' motivations, thinking about his family, and trying to find a comfortable position to sit with one arm chained to a wall. And yet the story is a true page-turner, as Delisle brings the reader so fully into André's world that a simple change in his routine becomes either harrowing or hopeful, and the mundane details of his daily existence, saving a piece of bread from his morning meal for a snack, enjoying some music drifting through the wall into his cell, become heroic acts of defiance.