Les Cahiers d'Esther by Riad Sattouf: the last part comes out in June

The ninth and final volume of Riad Sattouf's Cahiers d'Esther, a comic strip which follows a child and then a teenager since she was 10, is due to be published on June 6, the publisher announced on Tuesday.

Entitled Stories from My 18 Years, this volume concludes the adventures of the young Parisian with the horrors of the Terminale: Parcoursup, the baccalaureate and coming of age. “Esther is philosophical and a little dizzy at the moment of the big flight, but it’s going to go well, eh, we believe in it…”, write the Allary editions in the presentation of the work.

Also read: Riad Sattouf wins the Grand Prix at the Angoulême Comics Festival: “It was unthinkable!”

Riad Sattouf met the real “Esther”, the daughter of a couple of friends, in 2014 when she was in CM1, and wanted to tell her adventures in the magazine L’Obs, which at that time offered her a weekly page. The first page appeared there in October 2014. The plates of the year are then included in an album by Allary Éditions. The project, from the beginning, was to follow Esther from the age of 10 to the age of 18. More than 2 million copies have been sold for the first 8 volumes.

“If the best ethnologist in the world spends a few years among the Inuit, he will describe in detail their languages, their rites, their fishing techniques, but what will he say about the little 15-year-old Inuit guy who is tired of being cold during endless winters, who doesn't know why they live in this village, who dreams on social networks of going elsewhere...? This experience cannot be expressed through scientific work; it must be told in order to exist. This is what I, modestly, tried to do with Les Cahiers d’Esther,” underlines Riad Sattouf in the press release from the publishing house.

After this last volume of the series, the Franco-Syrian will cease to be published by Allary. In 2021, he founded his own publishing house, Les Livres du futur, which has to date published only one book, Le Jeune Acteur 1, the first volume of a biography of the actor Vincent Lacoste.