In Paco Roca’s intimate and international award-winning graphic novel, The House, three adult siblings return to their family’s quaint vacation home a year after their father’s death with the intention to clean up the residence and put it on the market. But as garbage is hauled off and dust is wiped away, decades-old resentments quickly fill the vacant home.

Through flashbacks into each sibling’s memories — the fig trees they grew up climbing, the pergola they never got around to building, the final visits to the hospital — Roca gives us a glimpse into domestic moments of joy, guilt, and disappointment while asking what happens to brothers and sisters when the only person holding the family together is now gone. At once deeply personal (dedicated to Roca’s own deceased father) and entirely universal, The House details the struggle to overcome the past, while still holding onto the memories.

• TPB
  5/29/2021