” De Niro`s Game” is the stunning winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award & the very first novel by up-&-coming Lebanese literary star Rawi Hage, also author of ” Cockroach”. Bassam & George are childhood best friends who have grown up on the Christian side of war-torn Beirut. Now on the verge of adulthood, they must choose their futures: to remain in the exhausted, corrupt city of their birth, or to go into exile abroad, cut off from the only existence they have known. Bassam chooses one path
- obsessed with leaving Beirut, he embarks on a series of petty crimes to fund his escape to the West. Meanwhile, George amasses power in the underworld of the city, embracing a life of military service, organised crime, killing, & drugs. But their two paths inevitably collide, with explosive consequences. ” De Niro`s Game” is Rawi Hage`s devastating, timely portrait of two young men & an entire city formed & deformed by war. ”A large & unsettling talent”. (” Guardian”). ”A masterpiece.. .writing cannot really get much better”. (” Literary Review”). ” Hollywood noir meets opium dreams in a blasted landscape of war-wasted young lives”. (” Boston Globe”).” The most subtly nuanced, psychologically compelling book about the corrosive effects of war to be written for a long time.. . The descriptions of the city are so skilful you can taste the dust in the air”. (” Financial Times”). Rawi Hage was born in Beirut, Lebanon, & lived through nine years of the Lebanese civil war. He is the author of ” De Niro`s Game”, which won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; ” Cockroach”, which was the winner of the Paragraphe Hugh Mac Lennan Prize & also listed for various other prizes; & Carnival, to be published by Hamish Hamilton/ Penguin in April 2013. He lives in Montreal.