Book cover for Voices in the Dark by Ulli Lust

Voices in the Dark

2017 Released
368 Pages
6-9 Hours
Ebook Unavailable
Audiobook Unavailable
Paperback Unavailable
Hardback Unavailable
New York Review ComicsISBN 9781681371054
Translated by John Brownjohn, Nika Knight
Germany, in the final years of the Third Reich. Hermann Karnau is a sound engineer obsessed with recording the human voice in all its variations--the rantings of leaders, the roar of crowds, the rasp of throats constricted in fear--and indifferent to everything else. Employed by the Nazis, his assignments take him to Party rallies, to the Eastern Front, and into the household of Joseph Goebbels. There he meets Helga, the eldest daughter: bright, good-natured, and just beginning to suspect the horror that surrounds her...

Based on an acclaimed novel by Marcel Beyer, Voices in the Dark is the first fictional graphic novel by Ulli Lust, whose award-winning graphic memoir Today Is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life appeared in English in 2013. It is the story of an unlikely friendship and of a childhood betrayed, a grim parable of naïveté and evil, and a vivid, unsettling masterpiece.

This NYRC edition is a trade paperback and features full color throughout and new English hand-lettering.

Ulli Lust

Ulli Lust, born in Vienna in 1967, is an award-winning comic artist and illustrator. The German edition of this book, published in 2025, won that year’s €25,000 German Nonfiction Prize, awarded by Germany’s publishers and booksellers association—the first time a graphic-format book was awarded the prize.

The original edition of Early Man Was a Woman, Book 2 (forthcoming from The Experiment) was awarded the 2026 Max Und Moritz Award for Best Non-fiction Comic, the most important award for graphic literature in German-speaking countries. Her graphic memoir Today Is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life garnered international acclaim and won the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Ignatz Award. Her subsequent books include How I Tried to Be a Good Person and Voices in the Dark, based on the novel by Marcel Beyer.

She teaches drawing and comics at the Hanover University of Applied Sciences and Arts.

More by Ulli Lust

Nika Knight

Translated by

Nika Knight is a translator and writer living in southern Maine.

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