The Hakawati by Rabih Alameddine

"Here is absolute beauty. One of the finest novels I've read in years."
--Junot Díaz

"Stunning."
-- The New York Times Book Review

"Sharp, seductive storytelling."
-- O, The Oprah Magazine

"Delightful. . . . Alameddine juxtaposes truth and fiction, contemporary lust and bawdy tales of the past, today's grief and sorrow in the ancient world."
-- The Washington Post Book World

"A wonderful book-poignant, profane.... This novel will keep you transfixed."
-- The Boston Globe

"Alameddine's intoxicating, ambitious, multi-layered new novel is a marvel of storytelling bravado."
-- The Seattle Times

In 2003, Osama al-Kharrat returns to Beirut after many years in America to stand vigil at his father's deathbed. The city is a shell of the Beirut Osama remembers, but he and his friends and family take solace in the things that have always sustained them: gossip, laughter, and, above all, stories. Osama's grandfather was a hakawati, or storyteller, and his bewitching stories--of his arrival in Lebanon, an orphan of the Turkish wars, and of how he earned the name al-Kharrat, the fibster--are interwoven with classic tales of the Middle East, stunningly reimagined. Here are Abraham and Isaac; Ishmael, father of the Arab tribes; the ancient, fabled Fatima; and Baybars, the slave prince who vanquished the Crusaders. Here, too, are contemporary Lebanese whose stories tell a larger, heartbreaking tale of seemingly endless war--and of survival.--From publisher description.