'Absolute Jafar is a wondrous tapestry of languid humour, mournful art-making and stupendous fun in strange cities. This is an anti-anxiety pill of a graphic novel. Keep it handy.' - MOHAMMED HANIF

'When I was first asked to blurb this book, I responded that I would be willing to blurb anything written by Sarnath Banerjee, even if it had been hastily scrawled across an airline napkin. As it happens, Absolute Jafar has not been scrawled across an airline napkin. Far from it! Clearly drawn with top-notch art supplies on high-quality paper, it is a rich compendium of the sights and stories gathered by Banerjee's alter ego Brighu, a perpetual flaneur-migrant who feels compelled to walk extensively on a daily basis, even if it means escaping a heavily guarded compound in Karachi while wearing a polyester shalwar-kameez to avoid attracting the attention of potential kidnappers. Banerjee's drawings show tremendous range, from classic cartooning, to loose sketches, to richly imagined paintings, and the narrative swoops and flows between Brighu's meanderings, observations on philosophy and popular culture, marriage, parenthood, and most importantly the idea of home, as imagined through the German term heimat. Although I am a fan of all of Banerjee's work, this is perhaps his finest, a volume I know I'll return to again and again.' - DAISY ROCKWELL

Sarnath Banerjee is the author of the graphic novels Corridor, The Barn Owl's Wondrous Capers, The Harappa Files, All Quiet in Vikaspuri and Doab Dil. He created Gallery of Losers, a series of billboards for the 2012 London Olympics. His installation, Critical Imagination Deficit, was showcased at the 13th Berlin Biennale 2025. His recent solo exhibitions include The Melancolony of a Heartburn City for the Gujral Foundation, and The Spectral Times, which was shown at the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Mumbai.

He has been a Belknap fellow at Princeton University, a CAST fellow at MIT, Cambridge, a fellow of Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, and was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. Banerjee also co-founded the award-winning publishing house Phantomville. He is currently working with Rohan Debroy on an illustrated book about mosquitoes and how they challenged the British Empire.