While the French may be besotted with them, graphic novels – apart from those by cult practitioners such as Art Spiegelman and Joe Sacco – have never had much credibility on these shores. Marjane Satrapi’s two-part memoir changed that. In simple, bold, black-and-white drawings she tells the story of her childhood as the daughter of two well-meaning Marxists in revolutionary Iran. Through her six-year-old eyes and later as a student she recounts the experience of both the Islamic Revolution and the war with Iraq and she does so with both seriousness and charm. Like Khaled Hosseini, Satrapi shows a country by which the West is transfixed from an unusual angle. It was the combination of this powerful background, the striking graphics and a touching innocence that stopped Persepolis from being mawkish and made it into affecting personalised history.