Niffenegger recalls her undergraduate days at the Art Institute of Chicago: 'It was a heyday of performance art. 'Because I'm a book artist, I tend to move among a lot of different ways of telling stories, using words and pictures, or both,' she says. To follow Niffenegger's evolution as artist and writer is to be led through a fascinating-and unusual-imaginative world. Her passion for books and the visual arts weaves through her novels and is central to The Night Bookmobile. She has degrees from the Art Institute of Chicago and Northwestern University, and she cofounded Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts, where she continues to teach. 'We're all trained to write, but a lot of us aren't getting any artistic training as kids.' Niffenegger is no newcomer to the visual arts. 'It's easier for artists to become writers than vice versa,' she says. Well-known novelists turning to the comics form is nothing new these days, but Niffenegger, author of the bestselling literary fantasies The Time Traveler's Wife and Her Fearful Symmetry, may be the first to draw as well as to write her comic. Audrey Niffenegger's The Night Bookmobile will be published by Abrams, while Ballantine will release Diana Gabaldon's The Exile: An Outlander Graphic Novel. A couple of novelists known for their time-traveling abilities (or at least those of their characters) are making another kind of move in September-to graphic novels.

Vidalia in Paris by Sasha Watson