Yalo (Rainmaker Translations)

“A heartbreaking book and sometimes hypnotic in beauty. . . . With both gentle and cruel images, Khoury wrote a lamentation for the generation that was corrupted and lost its children, and for the children themselves.”—Haaretz

Elias Khoury’s most recent novel propels us into a fantastic universe of skewed reality that leaves us breathless to the last page. We follow the path of a young man, Yalo, who is growing up like a stray dog on the streets of Beirut during the long years of the Lebanese civil war. Living with his mother, who “lost her face in the mirror,” he falls in with a dangerous gang whose violent escapades he treats as a game. The game becomes a frightening reality, however, when Yalo is accused of rape and imprisoned. He is forced to confess to crimes of which he has no recollection. As he writes, and rewrites, he begins to grasp his family’s past and recall all that his psyche has buried, and the true Yalo begins to emerge.

Elias Khoury is the author of twelve novels, four volumes of literary criticism, and three plays. Editor of the cultural pages of Beirut’s An-Nahar, Khoury also is a global distinguished professor at New York University. Gate of the Sun was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 2006.

Peter Theroux translated Abdelrahman Munif's Cities of Salt, Naguib Mahfouz's Children of the Alley, and Alia Mamdouh’s Naphtalene: A Novel of Baghdad. He has lived and traveled throughout the Middle East and is currently based in Washington, DC.