In the early 1980s, Art Spiegelman, co-founder of Raw, began inserting a tiny, almost illegible comic called Maus into the magazine. Maus now comes in a more readable two-volume novel format. It depicts the story of a survivor of Hitler's concentration camps. The survivor in question is Vladek Spiegelman, Art's father. This complex work shows the cartoonist trying to come to terms with his father, his father's terrifying story and history itself. Spiegelman draws the Nazis as cats and Jews as mice, shocking the reader out of any sense of familiarity. It is an unvarnished, deeply disturbing story of daily life in the Auschwitz death camp - and the story of the author's tortured relationship with his ageing father. It even, incredibly, is sometimes funny.

It has been described as a "remarkable feat of documentary detail and novelistic vividness . . . an unfolding literary event".