The City of Belgium - Hardcover

by Brecht Evens (Author)

An exquisitely drawn exploration of three lost souls' emotional terrain

As night falls in the City of Belgium, three strangers in their late twenties--a most dangerous age--arrive at a popular restaurant. Jona is about to move away; he calls his wife, who's already settled in Berlin, before trying to make plans with friends for one last night on the town. No one bites--they're all busy or maybe they just don't want to party--but he's determined to make this night something to remember. Victoria is lively and energetic, but surrounded by friends and family who are buzzkills, always worrying about what is best for her. Rodolphe glumly considers his own misery and then suddenly snaps out of it, becoming the life of the party. The three careen through the city's nightlife spots and underbelly, getting ever deeper in the messiness of human existence as they chase pleasure--or at least a few distractions from their daily lives. Each has a series of misadventures that reveal them to be teetering on the edge of despair, of destruction, of becoming the people they'll be for the rest of their lives. The City of Belgium occupies a place between lucid dream and tooth-grinding nightmare.

Author Biography

The Belgian cartoonist Brecht Evens was born in 1986 and studied illustration in Ghent, Belgium. The Wrong Place (2009) started out as a graduation project and was a departure from the more typical comic art of his earlier work. It won the Haarlem Comic Festival's Willy Vandersteen Award for best Dutch-language graphic novel, and an award at the Angoulême International Comics Festival. He followed The Wrong Place with The Making Of (2012) and the critically acclaimed Panther (2016), which appeared on numerous best-of-the-year lists, including NPR, Vulture, Paste, and others. Evens lives in Paris in a charming and oh-so-Parisian garret apartment.