The Angel of History by Rabih Alameddine

Winner of the Northern California Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction, and the Arab American Book Award for Fiction
A Washington Independent Review of Books, Literary Hub, and Shelf Awareness Best Book of the Year

"The Angel of History takes place in a single day, but it reads like an epic . . . a sprawling fever dream of a novel, by turns beautiful and horrifying, and impossible to forget . . . Alameddine is a writer with a boundless imagination . . . [his] writing is so beautiful, so exuberant . . . When Alameddine aims for the heart, he doesn't miss, and he hits hard . . . The Angel of History isn't just a brilliant novel, it's a heartfelt cry in the dark, a reminder that we can never forget our past, the friends and family we've loved and lost. It's a raw love letter from those who survived a plague to those who didn't." --NPR.org

"A remarkable novel, a commentary of love and death, creativity and spirituality, memory and survival . . . brilliant . . . [it] hits an emotional nerve." --Los Angeles Review of Books

"Excellent, lissome . . . the novel is a work of social and cultural memorialization . . . The Angel of History suggests that to be alienated--from past love and from the past itself--is to open the door to memory and creation . . . to read Alameddine's prose is to see loss, if not mastered, then at least made into lively and living art." --San Francisco Chronicle

"Laced with literary references . . . a kaleidoscopic storytelling style, and philosophical humor." --New Yorker

""This is a story of one life and many themes: in this case, death and sex; religion; war; the purpose of art and of love and loss; and the need to remember. Here is a book, full of story, unrepentantly political at every level. At a time when many western writers seem to be in retreat from saying anything that could be construed as political, Alameddine says it all, shamelessly, gloriously." --Guardian

"Alameddine has created a scintillating, original work whose moral complex

Set over the course of one night in the waiting room of a psych clinic, this novel follows Yemeni-born poet Jacob as he revisits the events of his life, from his maternal upbringing in an Egyptian whorehouse to his adolescence under the aegis of his wealthy father and his life as a gay Arab man in San Francisco at the height of AIDS. Hovered over by the presence of alluring, sassy Satan who taunts Jacob to remember his painful past and dour, frigid Death who urges him to forget and give up on life, Jacob is also attended to by 14 saints.