On Boxing Day 2004, Edith Fassnidge set out for a day of kayaking off the coast of Thailand. She paddled along with her boyfriend, Matt. In a second canoe was her mother, Sally, and her sister, Alice.

You surely know what’s coming next. Lowering her new digital camera, Fassnidge felt the atmosphere change somehow, a peculiar barometric adjustment she was unable to explain. Then something caught her eye on the horizon: “an awful ridge of white” moving towards her on an otherwise pond-like sea. Streaking ever closer, it effortlessly knocked over a sailing boat. Moments later, it hit. “I felt like I was being spun around in a giant washing machine,” she writes, in her new graphic memoir, Rinse, Spin, Repeat. “My head kept smashing into the rocks”. How much more could she take before she was knocked out?

Quite a lot, as things turned out. Having survived the wave itself, the hours that followed were an endurance test straight out of a Hollywood movie. Fassnidge soon found her mother’s body, but Alice and Matt had disappeared. Getting out of the water, she saw that her legs and arms – every part of her, in fact – were covered in deep lacerations, wounds that would, as she pulled herself up through the brush beyond the rocks, soon be overrun with venomous ants. She longed to sleep but, desperately dehydrated and with no shelter from the sun, knew that if she were to close her eyes she might never wake up. So she kept moving, looking for a way to get herself away from the water, and on to a beach.

Rinse, Spin, Repeat describes all this, and the traumatic days that follow, in which, rescued at last, she undergoes more than one round of surgery; is miraculously reunited with Matt; and finally comes to understand, if not exactly to accept, that her sister (as well as her mother) is dead.

I’ve read many accounts of the 2004 tsunami, and all of them have been moving, upsetting, unfathomable. This telling, though, is powerfully affecting, perhaps because it has such simplicity. Fassnidge is not an artist by training, and this is her first (crowd-funded) book. I don’t think anyone would describe the way she tells her story as beautiful; her people are close to being stick figures, her beaches just curves on a white page. Yet her line drawings are so effective: their straightforwardness, their emotional minimalism; somehow, she says more in half a dozen wonky lines and four words than some writers do in a thousand slaved-over pages.

For this reason, it’s a painful book to read at times, but it comes with great hope, too – Fassnidge is someone who sees glittering silver linings in the inkiest of clouds - and if you buy it, you will be helping Music for Alice, the charity she set up in memory of the dear sister she lost.

Rinse, Spin, Repeat is published by Cornerstone (£16.99). Click here to buy it for £13.93