November (Second Half)

Over 20 years, Andrus Kivirähk’s November has claimed its rightful place among Estonia’s literary classics. The dark fantasy’s characters spend their days outwitting the devil and pilfering one another’s possessions. Unimaginable scenes of Márquez-like magical realism (such as dead spirits, manifested as giant white chickens, whisking one another in the sauna) take place in a setting populated by mythical beings such as sea cows and hundred-legged lynx. All the while, the text takes an honest and unvarnished look at the pains of being human, as well as how ridiculous that suffering can be.

Veiko Tammjärv has cast the acclaimed work in a visual form that never compromises the fantastical reveries of the original. Equal parts robust and existential, the graphic novel conjures a world that is easy to lose oneself in and haunts the reader like the recollection of a dream – a memory that, albeit unsettling, is fascinatingly accurate and magical.