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THE SEARCH FOR A MISSING FATHER
Samir leaves the safety and comfort of his family’s adopted home in Germany for volatile Beirut in an attempt to find his missing father. His only clues are an old photo and the bedtime stories his father used to tell him. The Storyteller follows Samir’s search for Brahim, the father whose heart was always yearning for his homeland, Lebanon. In this moving and gripping novel about family secrets, love, and friendship, Pierre Jarawan does for Lebanon what Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner did for Afghanistan. He pulls away the curtain of grim facts and figures to reveal the intimate story of an exiled family torn apart by civil war and guilt. In this rich and skillful account, Jarawan proves that he too is a masterful storyteller.
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Praise for The Storyteller
‘A literary debut of astounding maturity, refinement, and narrative power’
Literatur Abendzeitung
‘Jarawan’s narrative is captivating, fast-paced, and true to life—a fascinating exploration of the question of what it means to be influenced by several cultures at the same time’
Frankfurter Neue Presse
‘His masterful debut successfully interweaves historical events and a suspense-filled investigation of one family’s fate into a novel that deeply moves its readers’
New Books in German
‘In a sweeping style reminiscent of oriental storytelling, Jarawan tells of escape, migration, and a family torn between two cultures. His debut succeeds in bringing a foreign culture into focus and awakens in the reader a fascination with the Land of the Cedars’
Kulturtipp
‘The story of an escape, of a family, and of the Middle East: how the fate of one family is inevitably linked with Lebanon’s history. An enthralling novel which couldn’t be more timely’
Rhein-Zeitung
‘Pierre Jarawan has brilliantly worked Lebanon’s complicated history into his debut novel’
TAZ
‘This book is a masterwork—a debut of great class’
Booklover & Dreamcatcher
‘There are many good reasons to read this book immediately. Above all, it’s a wonderful, terrifically narrated story that will enchant you timelessly!’
MIKE LITT, WDR 1Live Klubbing
‘This new literary voice is particularly melodious and memorable. The Storyteller is an elegantly and unobtrusively narrated novel that shows us what is behind and beyond the narrow stuffy rooms that we call “our world,” our Europe, our West. With this novel, the doors open to a thousand other beautiful incomprehensible worlds’
ALEXANDER SOLLOCH, NDR Culture New Books
‘A moving and wonderfully constructed story, full of beautiful images—Jarawan teaches us about history and the future, without ever becoming didactic’
Tzum
‘An exciting family mystery, focusing on both historical and current political situations; a testimony to the way migrants are torn between their old homeland and their new’
Ruhr Nachrichten
‘A beautiful book full of fascinating storytelling and poetic language that you devour without stopping for breath. If you start reading this book, you’ll want to keep reading it, rereading it’
Leeskost
‘Jarawan has produced a fairytale that could be straight out of One Thousand and One Nights. From the very beginning, you float away on the story as if on a flying carpet’
NRC Handelsblad
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PIERRE JARAWAN was born in 1985 to a Lebanese father and a German mother and moved to Germany with his family at the age of three. Inspired by his father’s love of telling imaginative bedtime stories, he started writing at the age of thirteen. He has won international prizes as a slam poet, received the City of Munich literary scholarship (the Bayerische Kunstförderpreis) for The Storyteller, and was chosen as Literature Star of the Year by the daily newspaper AZ.
SINÉAD CROWE is a native of Dublin, Ireland, and currently works as a freelance translator in Hamburg, Germany. Her short-story translations have appeared in The Short Story Project, and her translation of Ronen Steinke’s Fritz Bauer: Auschwitz vor Gericht is forthcoming from Indiana University Press.
RACHEL MCNICHOLL is a freelance translator and editor based in Dublin, Ireland. Her translations have appeared in journals and anthologies including The Stinging Fly, Manoa, No Man’s Land, Best European Fiction and The Short Story Project. Her translation of Nadja Spiegel’s short-story collection sometimes i lie and sometimes i don’t was published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2015. PEN America awarded Rachel a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant in 2016. In 2018, she had a funded residency at the Europäisches Übersetzer-Kollegium in Straelen, Germany, during which she worked on the final stages of The Storyteller.
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AUTHOR
‘People often ask me if this novel is autobiographical. It’s not. Samir’s story, Samir’s biography, is not mine—fortunately, you could say. Yet this book is full of impressions—images, smells, emotions—that draw on my own experiences. The image of the satellites all pointing in one direction, for example, is an image from my childhood; I grew up near that street. So I am in the story too, somewhat between the lines.’
TRANSLATORS
‘When we were growing up, Lebanon was synonymous with war. Of course, behind every news headline, real people were getting killed or fleeing for their lives. Translating this novel made us feel like we’d got to know a few of them, with all their joys, sorrows, and human imperfections. It also gave us insights into the challenges facing Lebanon’s younger generations as they try to heal the divisions of the past.’
PUBLISHER
‘Full of imagination and suspense, The Storyteller touches upon such pressing themes as immigration, displacement, cultural identity, and belonging, but above all it’s a wonderfully evocative story about family secrets, love, and friendship. It reminded me of The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini and The Return by Hisham Matar—I just love it.’
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Pierre Jarawan
The Storyteller
Translated from the German
by Sinéad Crowe and Rachel McNicholl
WORLD EDITIONS
New York, London, Amsterdam
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Published in the USA in 2019 by World Editions LLC, New York
Published in the UK in 2019 by World Editions Ltd., London
World Editions
New York/London/Amsterdam
Copyright © Piper Verlag GmbH, München/Berlin, 2016
English translation copyright © Sinéad Crowe and Rachel McNicholl, 2019
Cover image © Mohamad Itani / Plainpicture / Hollandse Hoogte
Author’s portrait © Marvin Ruppert
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data is available
ISBN Trade paperback 978-1-64286-011-5
ISBN E-book 978-1-64286-030-6