De Niro's Game

De Niro's Game is the stunning winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the very first novel by up-and-coming Lebanese literary star Rawi Hage, also author of Cockroach. 
 
Bassam and George are childhood best friends who have grown up on the Christian side of war-torn Beirut. Now on the verge of adulthood, they must choose their futures: to remain in the exhausted, corrupt city of their birth, or to go into exile abroad, cut off from the only existence they have known. 
 
Bassam chooses one path - obsessed with leaving Beirut, he embarks on a series of petty crimes to fund his escape to the West. Meanwhile, George amasses power in the underworld of the city, embracing a life of military service, organised crime, killing, and drugs. But their two paths inevitably 
collide, with explosive consequences. 
 
De Niro's Game is Rawi Hage's devastating, timely portrait of two young men and an entire city formed and deformed by war. 
 
'A large and unsettling talent' Guardian 
 
'A masterpiece . . . writing cannot really get much better' Literary Review 
 
'Hollywood noir meets opium dreams in a blasted landscape of war-wasted young lives' Boston Globe 
 
'The most subtly nuanced, psychologically compelling book about the corrosive effects of war to be written for a long time . . .The descriptions of the city are so skilful you can taste the dust in the air' Financial Times 
 
 
Rawi Hage was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and lived through nine years of the Lebanese civil war. He is the author of De Niro's Game, which won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; Cockroach, which was the winner of the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize and also listed for various other prizes; and Carnival, to be published by Hamish Hamilton/ Penguin in April 2013. He lives in Montreal.

Rawi Hage was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and lived through nine years of the Lebanese civil war during the 1970s and 1980s. He emigrated to Canada in 1992 and now lives in Montreal. His first novel, De Niro's Game, won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for the best English-language book published anywhere in the world in a given year, and has either won or been shortlisted for seven other major awards and prizes. Cockroach was the winner of the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Awards. It was also shortlisted for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Award and the Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Bassam and George are childhood best friends who have grown up on the Christian side of war-torn Beirut. Now on the verge of adulthood, they must choose their futures: to remain in the exhausted, corrupt city of their birth, or to go into exile abroad, cut off from the only existence they have known. 
 
Bassam chooses one path - obsessed with leaving Beirut, he embarks on a series of petty crimes to fund his escape to the West. Meanwhile, George amasses power in the underworld of the city, embracing a life of military service, organised crime, killing, and drugs. But their two paths inevitably 
collide, with explosive consequences. De Niro's Game is a devastating, timely portrait of two young men and an entire city formed and deformed by war.

Cockroach

Gripping. A humane and compassionate storyteller

Beautifully paced, filled with picaresque wit and misadventure, anchored by a dark and uncompromising vision . . . Rawi Hage has joined the great pantheon of Canadian writers whose work we read with admiration and excitement

Further evidence of Hage's large and unsettling talent

Our unnamed narrator has left his Middle-Eastern home and settled in a chilly, western city. He lives as an exile, untrusted, unwanted, foreign. A stranger trying to make sense of a strange land. 
 
But he brings with him secrets - of a family tragedy that he failed to prevent and a childhood overshadowed by war. And as he wanders snowy streets, falling in love with fellow exile Shoreh, he realizes that to find a place in this alien world it is necessary to become someone else. Someone he never dared to be in his past life . . .

Rawi Hage

Dark and compelling, a restlessly energetic and kaleidoscopic work

A rich and often beautiful, brave, engrossing, intelligent, literate, funny and very human novel. I enjoyed this book in so many ways. I relished this novel - for its compassion, its lyricism and its great human spirit

Exuberant, sublime, startling, surreal and breathtaking

Quite simply, a brilliant writer . . . Funny, angry, perceptive and poignant, Carnival confirms Hage's status as a star in the literary firmament

Every form of laughter this side of uproarious guffawing - the smile, the chuckle, the suppressed giggle, the nudge nudge, wink wink - comes into play in Rawi Hage's Carnival. A display of literary derring-do . . . both his funniest and his most serious book

There are two types of taxi driver in the Carnival city - the spiders and the flies. The spiders sit and stew in their cars, waiting for the calls to come to them. But the flies wander the streets, looking for the raised flags of hands. 
 
Fly is a wanderer. From the seat of his taxi we see the world in all of its carnivalesque beauty and ugliness. We meet criminals, prostitutes, madmen, revolutionaries, ordinary people going to extraordinary places. With all of the beauty, truth, rage, and peripatetic storytelling that have made his first two novels international sensations, Carnival is a tour de force that will make all of life's passengers squirm in their backseats.

Rawi Hage

Praise for Carnival

Dark and compelling, a restlessly energetic and kaleidoscopic work

A rich and often beautiful, brave, engrossing, intelligent, literate, funny and very human novel. I enjoyed this book in so many ways. I relished this novel - for its compassion, its lyricism and its great human spi ...

Exuberant, sublime, startling, surreal and breathtaking

Dark and compelling, a restlessly energetic and kaleidoscopic work

A rich and often beautiful, brave, engrossing, intelligent, literate, funny and very human novel. I enjoyed this book in so many ways. I relished this novel - for its compassion, its lyricism and its great human spi ...

Exuberant, sublime, startling, surreal and breathtaking

Dark and compelling, a restlessly energetic and kaleidoscopic work

A rich and often beautiful, brave, engrossing, intelligent, literate, funny and very human novel. I enjoyed this book in so many ways. I relished this novel - for its compassion, its lyricism and its great human spi ...

Exuberant, sublime, startling, surreal and breathtaking

Books by Rawi Hage

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