Team Photograph

In her extraordinary graphic novel, which masterfully incorporates poetry and elements of memoir, Lauren Haldeman layers the warfare of soccer over the battlefields now called Bull Run Regional Park, where, growing up, her soccer team would practise and compete. The park and surrounding town of Fairfax Station, Virginia set the landscape for the book, where the narrator regularly encounters spectral visions of wounded soldiers and very real artefacts of war. 'Wounded wraiths and faceless shapes' float in her hallway at night, and bullet shells, buttons, and human bones surface around the soccer fields in daylight.

The narrator turns to poetry and history to make sense of the town and its bloodshed, of its forever attachment to injustice and its inability to restore erased identities. Team Photograph is a journey from research to illumination, and the result is a tender yet powerful reckoning of time and place, proof that the past and the present are inexorably fused together.

'Curious, lonely, mournful, haunted, and strangely funny.' - Leslie Jamison, author of the NYT bestseller The Empathy Exams

'A stylish meditation on bookish inspiration.' - Kirkus Reviews

'Hypnotic... This haunted and haunting work will linger in the minds of readers.' - Publishers Weekly

'"The ghosts, long ago, / came to me / to be seen." The accuracy and openness with which Haldeman does this seeing is what makes her such a riveting visual artist and poet... Team Photograph becomes a surreal American ghost story which, like memory, shifts and changes under a direct gaze - a memoir as patchwork as the fields of Virginia, unified by the confident sweep of Haldeman's vision.' - Colorado Review