W.W. Norton & Company

The story of what a young David Small endured when the radiation his father exposed him to through his radiology practice took its toll and a growth began to form on David's neck. At age 14, he underwent surgery to remove the cyst and woke up from the operation to find he no longer had a voice — one of his vocal cords had been removed and he was virtually mute. Jules Feiffer wrote about the '09 graphic novel and said, "Like the boy in this autobiographical novel my first reading of Stitches left me speechless. And in awe. David Small presents us with a profound and moving gift of graphic literature that has the look of a movie and reads like a poem. Spare in words, painful in pictures, Small, in a style of dry menace, draws us a boy's life that you wouldn't want to live but you can't put down. From its first line four pages in, 'Mama had her little cough,' we know that we are in the hands of a master."

What to read next if you love it: Don't Go Where I Can't Follow, by Anders Nilsen