I would like to recommend a novel that we are going to be featuring at our Festival Neue Literatur in March and which is going to be published by World Editions on 2 April, 2019. Our festival theme is ‘In Memory We Trust’ and the debut novel The Storyteller by Pierre Jarawan, translated from the German by Sinéad Crowe and Rachel McNicholl, is the perfect fit for this motto.
It’s the story of Samir, whose parents have fled the Lebanese Civil War and made Germany their home. Samir is eight years old when his father disappears and changes the course of his life forever. Samir’s childhood is enshrouded in mystery and grief, until finally, as a young man, he takes off to Lebanon on a quest to find his father. His only clues are photographs and memories of the bedtime stories his father used to tell, whose characters he begins to encounter and recognize in real life. He is soon swept up in the turbulence of the past, of the Lebanese Civil War and every clue he unfolds, brings him a step closer to his father’s secret.
Pierre Jarawan, The Storyteller, translated by Sinéad Crowe and Rachel McNicholl (World Editions, 2019) Read NBG’s review here: http://www.new-books-in-german.com/node/196
Riky Stock has been in charge of cultural projects at the New York office of the Frankfurt Book Fair New York (formerly the German Book Office) since 2002. Prior to that, she worked for a literary scout and for the foreign rights department at HarperCollins Publishers.
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