Recommendations
Books Like Persepolis
Best books to read after Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
If Persepolis moved you — Marji growing up inside the Islamic Revolution and surviving Vienna's exile, the black-and-white art that makes the historical vivid and the personal political, the humor that survives everything the novel depicts — these eight books share its portrait of women under authoritarian regimes, its graphic memoir form, or its engagement with exile and cultural displacement.
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Maus
by Art Spiegelman
Art Spiegelman's father Vladek surviving Auschwitz, in graphic novel form — Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize winner is the canonical companion to Persepolis: the two most important graphic memoirs in Western literary culture, both organized around a child interviewing or observing a parent about their experience of mid-twentieth-century political catastrophe; where Satrapi depicts her own experience directly, Spiegelman depicts his father's experience with himself as the interviewer
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The Complete Persepolis
by Marjane Satrapi
Both volumes of Persepolis collected in one — if you read Persepolis and Persepolis 2 separately, this is the complete work; if you read the complete edition, the individual volumes expand the art slightly
- 3Buy
In the Time of the Butterflies
by Julia Alvarez
The four Mirabal sisters under the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic — Alvarez's novel shares Persepolis's portrait of women finding ways to resist and survive under authoritarian regimes that want to define and control them; where Satrapi uses the graphic memoir to make a girl's interior life visible against a revolutionary backdrop, Alvarez uses four different voices to show how differently women can respond to the same political situation
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Reading Lolita in Tehran
by Azar Nafisi
Azar Nafisi's memoir about the women's reading group she ran secretly in her home in Tehran for two years after resigning from her university position — the nonfiction companion to Persepolis in its portrait of Iranian women's intellectual and spiritual life under the Islamic Republic; where Satrapi depicts the revolution through a child's experience and graphic art, Nafisi depicts the later years of the regime through a literary scholar's private resistance
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Fun Home
by Alison Bechdel
Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir about her father's death, his secret homosexuality, and her own coming out — the closest Western companion to Persepolis in graphic memoir form: both works use the form's combination of text and image to examine a coming-of-age that is shaped by a family secret and a political context; where Satrapi's politics are national (the Islamic Revolution), Bechdel's are personal and familial
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The Kite Runner
by Khaled Hosseini
Amir and his childhood in 1970s Kabul, and his guilt over Hassan's rape during the Taliban's rise — Hosseini's debut shares Persepolis's portrait of middle-class life in a Muslim-majority country destroyed by political revolution and its aftermath; where Satrapi's Iran is the Iran of the Islamic Republic, Hosseini's Afghanistan is the Afghanistan of the Communist coup, the Soviet invasion, the civil war, and the Taliban; both works make the political tangible through individual and family experience
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A Thousand Splendid Suns
by Khaled Hosseini
Mariam and Laila, two Afghan women sharing a husband in Kabul through the Taliban and the American invasion — Hosseini's second novel shares Persepolis's portrait of women's lives under a fundamentalist regime that treats women's bodies as the site of political control; where Satrapi is drawing her own experience, Hosseini is imagining the experience of women from a background different from his own
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The Breadwinner
by Deborah Ellis
Parvana, an eleven-year-old Afghan girl who must disguise herself as a boy to support her family after her father is arrested by the Taliban — Ellis's novel shares Persepolis's portrait of a girl's coming of age under a fundamentalist regime that controls what women can wear, where they can go, and what they can do; recommended for readers who want to see the same themes in a novel rather than a graphic memoir
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