#BrunchBookChallenge: A review of The Beatles – All Our Yesterdays

The illustrations in The Beatles: All Our Yesterdays by Delhi-based Lalit Kumar Sharma are strong, edgy, almost dark.

A new Indian graphic novel takes you on a fabulously illustrated tour of the early days of everybody’s favourite rock band – the Beatles

Let’s begin at the beginning. The years were 1940-1943. The city of Liverpool in northern England was recovering from the German attacks during World War II. In those years were born four babies in four different parts of the city. Ordinary babies, you’d think. Only, in the years to come, they’d go on to form the greatest rock band there ever was.

The Beatles – All Our Yesterdays is a new graphic novel by the Delhi-based Campfire that has previously published several informative and illustrated books on famous personalities, such as Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa and Steve Jobs. This one takes you through the early days of the Fab Four, beginning with their lives in Liverpool, through their coming-of-age in Hamburg, right to the Swinging Sixties when their first single, Love Me Do, was released on that eventful Friday of ’62.

The illustrations by Delhi-based Lalit Kumar Sharma are strong, edgy, almost dark. The characters aren’t just caricatured versions, but drawn with a remote likeness to how they looked in real life. The fantastic graphics aside, it’s the writing by Jason Quinn that makes this book such a delight. Fans will be familiar with the life history of the Beatles, but to see it told with their characteristic wit, and with nuggets of little-known facts thrown in, makes this book a complete page-turner.

From HT Brunch, November 6, 2016

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