Inspired by Italo Calvino, Jeanette Winterson, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Uncanny X-Men, this surreal, darkly beautiful and unsettling graphic novel about five wounded orphans is by turns hilarious and horrific, grotesque and tender.
On an unnaturally dark night, an unnaturally black dog took a baby from its
cradle. Behave, child, or the same might happen to you!
In a cruel and arbitrary world, where disturbing lapses in logic are commonplace, five orphans must face their traumatic origins. Gabriella is a crippled angel, haunted by her inability to interpret prophecies. Cur is the rabid leader of a sect of dogs, desperate to escape his inheritance. Cuckoo is a gambler with a wax face determined to find a fixed
identity before his luck runs out. Magpie is a thief in search of the perfect photographic subject, but terrified of going blind. Crow is a leper trying to distil the essence of death as an antidote to dying. Each of them is deformed; each has a special ability; each is connected to all of the others. And each gets exactly what they deserve. Or do they?
In a world of increasing vacuity and self-concern, this beautiful illustrated edition of Five Wounds is like a medication - a mystical, elegant treatise on empathy that is at once also a novel and an anti-novel. It's a turning-point book, but one that can live on a coffee-table like a beating heart. I've seen nothing so rare, curious and beautiful in a long time. - DBC Pierre, author of Vernon God Little and Lights Out in Wonderland
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