Full Description
One night, a phone rings in Paris.
Adam learns that Mourad, once his closest friend, is dying. He quickly throws some clothes in a suitcase and takes the first flight out, to the homeland he fled twenty-five years ago.
Exiled in France, Adam has been leading a peaceful life as a respected historian, but back among the milk-white mountains of the East his past soon catches up with him. His childhood friends have all taken different paths in life — and some now have blood on their hands.
Loyalty, identity, and the clash of cultures and beliefs are at the core of this long-awaited novel by the French-Lebanese literary giant Amin Maalouf.
'Maalouf is a thoughtful, humane and passionate interlocutor.' — The New York Times Book Review
'A thoughtful, philosophically rich story
that probes a still-open wound. An exile returns home to a land still torn apart by
civil war 25 years afterward. Think The Big Chill in Beirut with some of the sex but little of the lightheartedness
in Jeune Afrique editor-in-chief Maalouf's charged novel.' — Kirkus Reviews
'Having moved from Beirut to
Paris with the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War, the Prix Goncourt-winning
Maalouf (The Rock of Tanios) deftly
lets us know how the changes wrought by time's passage really feel, especially
when one has traded continents and cultures.' — ALA Booklist
'Amin Maalouf gives us a perfect look at the thoughts and feelings that can lead to emigration. One can only be impressed by the magnitude and the precision of his introspection.' — Le Monde des Livres
'A great work, which explores the wounds of the exile and the compromises of those who stay.' — L'Amour des Livres
