Rawi Hage

In Carnival, IMPAC award-winning Rawi Hage explores the hidden underbelly of a city. 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. "A spellbinding success, a master storyteller. A tremendous novel". (Daily Telegraph). "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". (Guardian). "Dark and compelling, a restlessly energetic and kaleidoscopic work". (Financial Times). 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, 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.

Rawi Hage narra la vida de un inmigrante iraní, que llega a Canadá asediado por el sentimiento de culpa que le provoca la muerte reciente de su hermana, asesinada por su marido, y el amor que de pronto le despierta Shoreh, una hermosa mujer que, detras de su belleza, esconde un pasado oscuro. Asi a traves de este personaje, Hage se interna, con un sentido del humor acido que descorre el velo de la desesperacion, en la vida de los inmigrantes en las calles ordenadas de Montreal, la vida de un grupo de personas desterradas que, lejos de todo, pero cerca de si mismas, encuentran su lugar en el mundo.

During a bitterly cold winter in a snowy northern city, a self-confessed thief has just tried to commit suicide by hanging himself from a tree in the local park. Rescued against his will and obliged to attend sessions with a well-meaning but naïve therapist, our narrator tells her - and us - his heartrending and hallucinatory story.

Hage RawiDuring a bitterly cold winter in a snowy northern city, a self-confessed thief has just tried to commit suicide by hanging himself from a tree in the local park. Rescued against his will and obliged to attend sessions with a well-meaning but naive therapist, our narrator tells her - and us - his heartrending and hallucinatory story. Leading us back into his childhood in a war-toon country and forward into his current life in the smoky emigre cafes of his new city, Cockroach traces, with lyricism and dark humour, our narrator's journey, his longing for a place in the world, his guilt over his sister's death at the hands of her husband, and his love for an Iranian woman, Shoreh, whose life is also a flight from the darkness of the past. As the stories in this remarkable book converge, our narrator must confront the events of the past in the form of another moral but potentially murderous dilemma in the present.

«La prosa de Hage es a la vez nítidamente realista y emocionantemente llena de oscuras fantasías, como si Kahlil Gibran fumara costo con Hunter S. » Thompson. Washington City Paper «Una visión alucin

Una història incendiària i plena de bellesa sobre la Guerra Civil del Líban. Escrita amb ràbia, energia i explosivitat. Imprescindible. Deu mil bombes cauen sobre Beirut. En Bassam i en George observ

Il y a deux espèces de chauffeurs de taxi : les araignées et les mouches. Les araignées attendent patiemment les appels. Les mouches sillonnent les rues à la recherche dune main levée dans la nuée hu

Carnival is a new novel from IMPAC Literary Award winner Rawi Hage.WINNER OF THE PARAGRAPHE HUGH MACLENNAN PRIZE FOR FICTIONThere 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 are wanderers - they roam the streets, looking for the raised flags of hands.Fly is a wanderer and from the seat of his taxi we see the world in all of its carnivalesque beauty and ugliness. We meet criminals, prostitutes, madmen, magicians, and clowns of many kinds. We meet ordinary people going to extraordinary places, and revolutionaries just trying to find something to eat. With all of the beauty, truth, rage, and peripatetic storytelling that have made his first two novels international publishing sensations, Carnival gives us Rawi Hage at his searing best. By turns outrageous, hilarious, sorrowful, and stirring, Carnival is a tour de force that will make all of lifes passengers squirm in their comfortable, complacent backseats.Praise for Rawi Hage:A large and unsettling talentGuardianSearing, affecting, misanthropic. Im not from Lebanon and I dont live in Canada, but Cockroach managed to take me to where I come from and where I live now more powerfully than anything Ive read in a long while Mohsin HamidThe best novel I read this year was Rawi Hages Cockroach. A dark book, narrated with verve and brilliance. It made me jump for joy Colm Toibin, GuardianRawi 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 Niros 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 Generals Literary Awards. It was also shortlisted for the Rogers Writers Trust Fiction Award and the Scotiabank Giller Prize.

De Niros 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 Niros Game is Rawi Hages devastating, timely portrait of two young men and an entire city formed and deformed by war.A large and unsettling talentGuardianA masterpiece . . . writing cannot really get much betterLiterary ReviewHollywood noir meets opium dreams in a blasted landscape of war-wasted young livesBoston GlobeThe 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 airFinancial TimesRawi Hage was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and lived through nine years of the Lebanese civil war. He is the author of De Niros 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.

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 . . .