Work Like Any Other
Alex W. Inker and Virginia Reeves | Translated by Montana Kane
1920s Alabama. Roscoe T. Martin is fascinated by this new force spreading across the county—electricity. But with the banks getting ever tighter his wife, Marie, needs him to help run her family's farm. But he is no farmer and, year after year, the earth betrays them. Then he hits upon an idea to save himself, the farm, and his marriage! He sets about a project to siphon electricity from Alabama power via the overhead cables which run along the perimeter of the farm. It's a scam that works perfectly well until a young man working for the power company is electrocuted and killed on Roscoe's illegal lines and Roscoe is arrested...The cell of a penitentiary, the decomposition of a marriage, the ruthless land that makes this a humanist fable that still resonates today, all wonderfully portrayed by Alex W. Inker's brutally delicate art.
Alex W Inker graduated in 2006 from the Institut Saint-Luc in Brussels in Comics and went on to earn a Master 2 in Cinema. He was a professor at the University of Lille where he taught the links between comics and cinema. He lives in Lille, France.
Virginia Reeves is a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. Her debut novel, on which this title is based, Work Like Any Other, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and Booklist named it to their Top 10 First Novels of 2016. She teaches writing and speech at Helena College, in Montana.
Montana Kane grew up in France and Morocco where she spent her childhood reading French comic books. She has translated over 270 comics and graphic novels.
