Meanwhile, George builds his power in the underworld of the city and embraces a life of military service, crime for profit, killing, and drugs.
Bassam chooses one path: Obsessed with leaving Beirut, he embarks on a series of petty crimes to finance his departure. Now they must choose their futures: to stay in the city and consolidate power through crime or to to into exile abroad, alienated from the only existence they have known. … Bassam and George are childhood best friends who have grown to adulthood in wartorn Beirut.
Awards and HonoursĢ008 Governor General’s Literary Awards–Fiction (English) (Finalist)Ģ008 Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction (Quebec Writers’ Federation) (Winner)Ģ008 Roger’s Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize (Nominated) 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 night-time 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. Rescued against his will, the narrator is obliged to attend sessions with a well-intentioned but naïve therapist. 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. Awards and HonoursĢ018 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize (Finalist)Ģ018 Governor General’s Literary Award, English Fiction (Finalist)Ģ018 The Globe 100 ( Globe and Mail, 1 Dec. 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. It asks what, if anything, can be accomplished or preserved in the face of certain change and certain death. 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.Ĭombining comedy and tragedy, Beirut Hellfire Society is a brilliant, urgent meditation on what it is to live through war. A3 Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)īeirut 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.
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