Letter to Survivors

Amid the blasted rubble of a once-perfect suburb, a hazmat-suited postman delivers the mail, aloud. He shouts his letters down a vent to the bunker-bound family below. They describe the family's prosperous past life, and then get stranger and stranger...

Drawn by the famed cartoonish and Charlie Hebdo contributor Gébé, and never before available English, Letter to Survivors is a blackhearted delight, a scathing, impassioned send-up of consumerist excess and nuclear peril: funnier—and scarier—than ever.

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Praise

Originally published in France in 1981, the late Gébé’s post-apocalyptic warning makes its English-language debut thanks to award-winning, superbly prodigious (300-plus translated graphic titles!) Gauvin. His astute, context-rich introduction to the multifaceted, Charlie Hebdo-famed Georges Blondeaux (“Gébé” is the French pronunciation of his initials), underscores—ironically, tragically, yet somehow comically—the timeless efficacy of this 'slim, disillusioned volume' about the perils of blind capitalism and imminent self-destruction.
—Booklist, starred review

Built on a foundation of whimsical gallows humor, this book bursts at the seams with lessons as relevant to the current state of the world as when it was first published in France over 35 years ago... Through black-and-white cartoon linework, the characters of the letters and the family they are being read to are brought to life in a manner as satirical and pointed as the lessons they are depicting.
—Publishers Weekly, starred review