Five Wounds [Hardcover]

In a world of increasing vacuity and self-concern, this beautiful illustrated edition of Five Wounds is like a medication - a mystical, elegant treatise on empathy that is at once also a novel and an anti-novel. It's a turning-point book, but one that can live on a coffee-table like a beating heart. I've seen nothing so rare, curious and beautiful in a long time. (DBC Pierre, author of Vernon God Little and Lights Out in Wonderland )

The template suggests an old-fashioned children's classic: handsome proportions, elegant print, fancy chapter headings, centre plates on shiny paper. But a virus has gotten in there: the illustrations are nightmarish and hermetic, calling on the Tarot, Escher, psychotic heraldry, and the text here and there is scribbled through, the nice fonts mocked by scrawled block capitals. And the story likewise takes the blackness that underpins traditional fairytales and brings it front and centre. .... [T]he book takes you places, and the illustrations are wonderful. (Owen Richardson The Age )

Five Wounds is one of those books I enjoyed holding, opening and exploring, and not just because it's excitingly different to many of the books I read. Beyond being a well-crafted text, it's a work of art in its own right. As good literature often will, it also extended my interest in a range of ideas, challenging me to explore new directions - in terms of the visual, the historical, the literary, the scientific, the geographical. But more than anything, it fulfilled its promise of adventure and playfulness. (Paul Burman The View From Here )

Jonathan Walker has successfully created a grubby and brutal otherwordly tone reminiscent of Patrick Suskind's Perfume. Dan Hallett's illustrations are either beautifully detailed and constrained or loose and disturbing, but always in synch with the text. (Jen Breach The Big Issue )

Think back to your first trip with Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole, or how it felt to enter the Matrix after Neo takes the red pill. Five Wounds: An Illuminated Novel takes you down a similarly twisting path and leaves you pondering the journey well afterwards. .... a thought-provoking and beautifully presented work. (Aliese Millington Transnational Literature )

Five Wounds by Jonathan Walker and Dan Hallett is atmospheric, grotesque, thrilling and tender. Certainly unlike anything else we've ever stumbled upon, this illustrated novel is a disturbing delight. ... With a beautiful hardcover ... [it] is a fantastic book to plonk on your lap in any public place, even if only to enjoy the sideways glances of passersby who seem to suspect you might at any moment turn to them, eyes dark, and incant at them in some frightening, grunting language. (James Scott The Spit Press )

The five senses are a common theme in Five Wounds and it seems fitting then, that it appeals to the senses in such detail. I have literally tried everything short of licking the book. The hardcover, thoughtful selection of paper stock and red ribbon page-marker makes the book seem like an artefact; it is a privilege to hold it. .... The scribblings peppered through out the book add to its mystery. I feel as if I am reading a diary, a draft, a spell book; something personal that was not meant for the eyes of others. .... [They] lend the book a desperate sense of urgency. (Dave Drayton Vibewire )

Inspired by Italo Calvino, Jeanette Winterson, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Uncanny X-Men, this surreal, darkly beautiful and unsettling graphic novel about five wounded orphans is by turns hilarious and horrific, grotesque and tender. On an unnaturally dark night, an unnaturally black dog took a baby from its cradle. Behave, child, or the same might happen to you! In a cruel and arbitrary world, where disturbing lapses in logic are commonplace, five orphans must face their traumatic origins. Gabriella is a crippled angel, haunted by her inability to interpret prophecies. Cur is the rabid leader of a sect of dogs, desperate to escape his inheritance. Cuckoo is a gambler with a wax face determined to find a fixed identity before his luck runs out. Magpie is a thief in search of the perfect photographic subject, but terrified of going blind. Crow is a leper trying to distil the essence of death as an antidote to dying. Each of them is deformed; each has a special ability; each is connected to all of the others. And each gets exactly what they deserve. Or do they?