From the internationally acclaimed author of the novels De Niro’s Game, Cockroach, Carnival and Beirut Hellfire Society, here is a captivating and cosmopolitan collection of stories.In Montreal, a photographer’s unexpected encounter with actress Sophia Loren leads to a life-altering revelation about his dead mother. In Beirut, a disillusioned geologist eagerly awaits the destruction that will come with an impending tsunami. In Tokyo, a Jordanian academic delivering a lecture at a conference receives haunting news from the Persian Gulf. And in Berlin, a Lebanese writer forms a fragile, fateful bond with his voluble German neighbours.The irresistible characters in Stray Dogs lead radically different lives, but all are restless travelers, moving between states—nation-states and states of mind—seeking connection, escaping the past and following delicate threads of truth, only to experience the...

An explosive new novel from the award-winning, bestselling author of De Niro's Game and Cockroach, and only the second Canadian (after Alistair Macleod) to win the prestigious Dublin IMPAC Literary Award.The Beirut Hellfire Society is a brilliant return to the world Rawi Hage first imagined in his extraordinary, award-winning first novel De Niro's Game, winner of the Dublin IMPAC Award, an international bestseller, finalist for the Giller, Governor General's, and Writers' Trust literary prizes, and widely considered a new Canadian classic.     Since publishing De Niro's Game more than a decade ago, Hage has followed up with two award-winning and acclaimed novels set in Montreal's immigrant community: Cockroach (shortlisted for the Giller Prize), and Carnival (shortlisted for the GG and Writers' Trust Fiction prizes). Now, with The Beirut...

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZEFrom the internationally acclaimed author of the novels De Niro’s Game, Cockroach, Carnival and Beirut Hellfire Society, here is a captivating and cosmopolitan collection of stories. In Montreal, a photographer’s unexpected encounter with actress Sophia Loren leads to a life-altering revelation about his dead mother. In Beirut, a disillusioned geologist eagerly awaits the destruction that will come with an impending tsunami. In Tokyo, a Jordanian academic delivering a lecture at a conference receives haunting news from the Persian Gulf. And in Berlin, a Lebanese writer forms a fragile, fateful bond with his voluble German neighbours. The irresistible characters in Stray Dogs lead radically different lives, but all are restless travelers, moving between states—nation-states and states of mind—seeking connection, escaping the past and following delicate threads of truth, only to experience the sometimes shocking, sometimes amusing and often random ways our fragile modern identities are constructed, destroyed, and reborn. Politically astute, philosophically wise, humane, relevant and caustically funny, these stories reveal the singular vision of award-winning writer Rawi Hage at his best.

Winner of the Quebec Writers' Federation Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and shortlisted for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize In the Carnival city there are two types of taxi drivers -- the spiders and the flies. The spiders patiently sit in their cars and wait for the calls to come. But the flies are wanderers - they roam the streets, looking for the raised hands of passengers among life's perpetual flux. Fly is a wanderer and a knower. Raised in the circus, the son of a golden-haired trapeze artist and a flying carpet pilot from the East, he is destined to drift and observe. From his taxi we see the world in all 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 trying to live ordinary lives. Hunger and injustice claw at the city, and books provide the only true shelter. And when the Carnival starts, all limits dissolve, and a gunshot goes off . . . With all of the beauty, truth, rage, and peripatetic storytelling that have made Cockroach and De Niro's Game international publishing sensations, Carnival gives us Rawi Hage at his searing best. Alternately laughing at absurdity and crying out at oppression, by turns outrageous, hilarious, sorrowful, and stirring, Carnival is a tour de force that will make all of life's passengers squirm in their comfortable, complacent backseats.

Winner of the IMPAC, one of the biggest library prizes in the world, this is a moving story about two young men coming of age in war-torn Beirut; one obsessed with leaving, the other who amasses power in the underworld and lives a life of violence. Their friendship is tested until finally their paths collide, explosively and tragically. 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. 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. This recording is unabridged. Typically abridged audiobooks are not more than 60 per cent of the author's work and as low as 30 per cent with characters and plot lines removed.Review"De Niro's Game is the most subtly nuanced, psychologically compelling book about the corrosive effects of war to have been written for a long time." FT Magazine "Intensely cinematic, his prose style jumps between fast-paced action, where the language hits the page like the rat-tat-tat of gunfire, and liquid metaphors that languidly twist, turn and coil one after another." The Daily Star, Lebanon"

From Publishers WeeklyStarred Review. With a surprising degree of humor, Hage's second novel (after IMPAC Dublin-winner DeNiro's Game) explores the peculiar politics of Montreal's immigrant communities through the bleak obsessions of a misanthropic thief. After trying and failing to kill himself, an unnamed narrator who believes himself to be part cockroach is compelled to attend counseling sessions with an earnest and alluring therapist. As he unspools his personal history—from his apprenticeship with the thief Abou-Roro to the tragic miscalculation that led him to flee his home country—the narrator, reluctant to tell his story (we never learn where the narrator is from, and inconsistencies in his tale cast doubt upon his honesty), scuttles through the stories of others, recounting secrets both confidentially shared and invasively discovered. Unable to support himself on burglary alone, the narrator takes a job as a busboy, but runs into complications after discovering his lover's connection to the restaurant's most prominent customer. The novel's gritty back-alley world gives rise to a host of glorious rogues, each swindling the others at every opportunity, and yet each is capable of great empathy under just the right circumstances. (Oct.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Review“Evoking both Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground and Kafka’s Metamorphosis, this magic-realist novel set in modern times brings to light, out of the darkness of a Canadian winter, the war-torn and violent past of its characters.... readers will be fascinated both by the inner lives of the troubled characters and by the textured portrait of Montreal’s immigrant community.”