With Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes just having won the Costa Biography Award, and Chris Ware’s extraordinary-sounding Building Stories popping up on year’s-best lists, it seems clear to me that I’m missing out by not reading graphic novels. It’s not that I don’t like the form, more that I don’t really know where to start. So…

Please give me your graphic novel recommendations for someone who, like me, comes from a prose fiction-reading (rather than a comics-reading) background. Not Watchmen or Sandman, though — but something I might not have heard of. (And proper recommendations only, please — no advertising.)

Martin Lewis stopped by to recommend Days of the Bagnold Summer in the comments of my Costa post. What else could we add to the list?