Childhood best friends Bassam and George have grown to be men in war-ravaged Beirut. Now they must choose between the only two futures available to them: to stay in the devastated city and consolidate power through crime or to go into exile abroad, alienated from the only existence they have ever known. Told in a distinctive, captivating voice that fuses vivid cinematic imagery, a page-turning plot, and exquisite, dark poetry, De Niro's Game is an explosive portrait of life in a war zone and a powerful meditation on what comes after. It won the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2008.

De Niro's Game: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Hage, Rawi

United States

Harper-perennial

Cockroach

Hamish Hamilton

Carnival

Penguin??Books

A stirring new masterpiece from the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award–winning author of Cockroach and De Niro’s Game. In Carnival, internationally acclaimed author Rawi Hage takes us into the world of Fly, a taxi driver in a crime-ridden apocalyptic metropolis. Raised in the circus, the son of a golden-haired trapeze artist and a flying-carpet man, Fly sees everything, taking in all of the city’s carnivalesque beauty and ugliness as he roves through its dizzying streets in his taxi. Fly is a reader, too, and when he’s not in his taxi he is at home in the equally dizzying labyrinth of books that fills his tiny apartment. His best friend is Otto, a political activist who’s in and out of jails and asylums, mourning his dead wife and lost foster son. On one otherwise tawdry night Fly meets Mary, a book-loving passenger with a domineering husband. So begins a romance that is, for Fly, a brief glimmer of light amid the shadows and grit of the Carnival city.
Along with Otto and Mary, Fly introduces us to madmen and revolutionaries, magicians and prostitutes as he picks them up and drops them off, traveling through a nightmarish town that is―we can’t help but notice―a parable for our own debauched, unjust world.
Wildly imaginative and darkly ironic, Carnival is a magnificent achievement.

Carnival: A Novel

Literary

W.W.Norton&Company

A bold, razor-sharp novel about a shadowy antihero navigating Montreal’s immigrant underworld. One of the most highly anticipated novels of the year, Cockroach is as urgent, unsettling, and brilliant as Rawi Hage’s critically acclaimed first book, De Niro’s Game. The novel takes place during one month of a bitterly cold winter in Montreal’s restless immigrant community, where a self-described “thief” has just tried but failed to commit suicide by hanging himself from a tree in a local park. Rescued against his will, the narrator is obliged to attend sessions with a well-intentioned but naive therapist. This sets the story in motion, leading us back to the narrator’s violent childhood in a war-torn country, forward into his current life in the smoky émigré cafés where everyone has a tale, and out into the frozen nighttime streets of Montreal, where the thief survives on the edge, imagining himself to be a cockroach invading the lives of the privileged, but willfully blind, citizens who surround him. Cockroach combines an uncompromising vision of humanity with razor-sharp portraits of society's outsiders, and a startling, poetic sensibility with bracing jolts of dark humor.

Cockroach: A Novel

"Funny and sharp . . . playful and erotic."―New York Times Book Review In Montreal's restless immigrant community, our unnamed narrator is living in despair. Forced to visit a therapist after a suicide attempt, he brings us back to his childhood in a war-torn country, forward into his current life in the smoky émigré cafés where everyone has a tale, and out into the frozen nighttime streets of Montreal, where he imagines himself to be a cockroach invading the lives of the privileged, but willfully blind, citizens who surround him. Cockroach is a carnivalesque, philosophical novel that weaves dark humor with an accusatory, satirical voice, spawning from the subsurface to challenge humanity and its downfall.

On a ravaged street overlooking a cemetery in a Christian enclave in war-torn 1970s Beirut, we meet Pavlov, the son of a local undertaker. When his father dies suddenly, Pavlov is approached by a member of the mysterious Hellfire Society--an anti-religious sect that arranges secret burial for outcasts denied last rites because of their religion or sexuality. Pavlov agrees to take on his father's work for the society, and over the course of the novel he becomes a survivor-chronicler of his embattled and faded community at the heart of Lebanon's civil war.

Beirut Hellfire Society: A Novel

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

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. 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 Beirut Hellfire Society, Hage makes a stunning and mature return to wartorn Beirut of the 1970s, during the Civil War. Beirut Hellfire Society follows Pavlov, the twenty-something son of an undertaker, who, after his father's death, is approached by a member of the mysterious Hellfire Society--an anti-religious sect that, among their many rebellious and often salacious activities, arrange secret burial for those who have been denied it because the deceased was homosexual, atheist, or otherwise outcast and abandoned by their family, church, and state. Pavlov agrees to take up his father's work for the Society, and over the course of the novel acts as survivor-chronicler of his torn and fading community, bearing witness to both its enduring rituals and its inevitable decline. Combining comedy and tragedy, Beirut Hellfire Society is a brilliant, urgent meditation on what it is to live through war. It asks what, if anything, can be accomplished or preserved in the face of certain change and certain death. In short, this is a spectacular and timely new work from one of our major writers, and a mature, exhilarating return to some of the themes the author began to explore in his transcendent first novel, De Niro's Game.

Beirut Hellfire Society

Knopf Canada

De Niro's Game

anansi

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Books by Hage, Rawi

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hage, Rawi. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

De Niro's Game: A Novel

Cockroach

Carnival

Carnival: A Novel

Cockroach: A Novel

Cockroach: A Novel

Beirut Hellfire Society: A Novel

Beirut Hellfire Society

De Niro's Game

Cockroach