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  • Published: 15 January 2012
  • ISBN: 9780224086813
  • Imprint: Square Peg
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 208
  • RRP: $35.00
Categories:

The House that Groaned




Introducing a fresh and utterly original new star in the graphic novel world.

The House That Groaned is a graphic novel that explores bodies and the spaces they inhabit.

It is set in an old Victorian tenement housing six lonely individuals who could only have stepped out of the pages of a comic book. There is the retoucher who cannot touch, a grandmother who literally blends into the background and a twenty-something bloke who's sexually attracted to diseased women.

Yet, as we learn the stories behind these extreme characters, it becomes apparent that we may share simlar issues - as individuals and as a society.

  • Published: 15 January 2012
  • ISBN: 9780224086813
  • Imprint: Square Peg
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 208
  • RRP: $35.00
Categories:

About the author

Karrie Fransman

Karrie Fransman studied Psychology and Sociology at university and began writing her first graphic stories after reading Ghost World. She’s created comics for the Guardian, The Times, the Telegraph, New Statesman, Time Out and Psychologies Magazine. Her first book, The House that Groaned, was published by Square Peg in 2012.
www.karriefransman.com

Also by Karrie Fransman

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Praise for The House that Groaned

An enjoyable tale, dark but full of energy, fascinated by the private lives and perversity that bulge beneath suburbia's facade

James Smart, Guardian

A damn fine book; hugely, spectacularly impressive

ForbiddenPlanet.co.uk

You can't help but be by turns moved and repulsed by the inhabitants of 141 Rottin Road. But beneath their outrageous behaviour and serious hang-ups, they still have a touching humane side that we can all relate to, with their issues with body image, loneliness and pitiful attempts to overcome past traumas that have shaped the people they have become. I'm not usually a huge fan of graphic novels because I find them too shallow with superficial, stereotypical characters but that is certainly not true of The House That Groaned. Love it or hate it, you will be thinking about the characters long after you've turned the final page

Madhouse Family Reviews

Fransman's dual background as a psychology and sociology student and a creative advertiser helps underpin her skills at both characterisation and communication… By its melodramatic finales, The House That Groaned acknowledges some scars that miss their chance to heal, but also gives us a kind of happy ending for two tenants

Paul Gravett, Independent

Karrie Fransmen breaks all the rules of storytelling accumulated over the past thousands of years. She creates a confusion at first, then bursts into the obvious and simplest fact; that all the stories of and in our lives are personal and private.... The only way this wonderful book could have been written is by illustration...not by word... rather like the hidden stories drawn on the walls of caves

Nicolas Roeg, director of Don't Look Now and Walkabout

In a world where people know ever less about their neighbours, this graphic novel is both a fantasy…and a cautionary tale. Anyone who has ever lain in bed at night listening to the sound of unknown voices on the other side of the cardboard wall will relish the way she lets her imagination off its leash…funny…beautiful looking…this book might almost be alive

Rachel Cooke, Observer, Graphic Novel of the Month