The first and only graphic novel to win the Pulitzer Prize, Maus is a brutally moving work of art about a Holocaust survivor – and the son who survives him.
Maus tells the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler’s Europe, and his son Art Spiegelman, a cartoonist coming to terms with his father’s story. Approaching the unspeakable through the diminutive (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), Vladek’s harrowing story of survival is woven into the author’s account of his tortured relationship with his aging father. Against the backdrop of guilt brought by survival, they stage a normal life of small arguments and unhappy visits, studying the bloody pawprints of history and tracking its meaning for those who come next.
‘Like all great stories, it tells us more about ourselves than we could ever suspect’ Philip Pullman
‘The most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust’ Wall Street Journal
‘A brutally moving work of art’ Boston Globe