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Beirut Hellfire Society
- Narrated by: Ali Momen
- Length: 6 hrs and 50 mins
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Publisher's summary
FINALIST FOR THE SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ROGERS WRITERS' TRUST FICTION PRIZE
SHORTLISTED FOR THE GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARD FOR FICTION
An explosive new novel from the award-winning, bestselling author of De Niro's Game and Cockroach.
It is 1978 in Beirut, Lebanon, partway through that country's Civil War. On a torn-up street overlooking a cemetery in the city's Christian enclave, we meet an eccentric young man named Pavlov, the son of a local undertaker. When his father meets a sudden and untimely death, Pavlov is approached by a colourful member of the mysterious Hellfire Society--a secret group to which his father had belonged. The Society's purpose is to arrange burial or cremation for those who for various reasons have been outcast and abandoned by family, clergy and state. Pavlov agrees to take up his father's work for the society, and over the course of the novel he becomes a survivor-chronicler of his embattled and fading community, bearing witness to its enduring rituals as well as its inevitable decline.
Deftly combining comedy with tragedy, Beirut Hellfire Society is at once propulsive, elegiac, outrageous, profane and transcendent--a profoundly moving meditation on what it means to live through war. It asks what, if anything, can be accomplished or preserved in the face of certain change and imminent death. Here is an exhilarating, subversive, beautiful and timely new work that reinforces Rawi Hage's status as one of our most original, necessary, fearless and important writers.
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Critic reviews
2018, Governor General's Literary Awards-Fiction, Short-listed
2020, Governor General's Literary Award, Short-listed
"Potent.… Hage’s novel is a brisk, surreal, and often comic plunge into surviving the absurd nihilism of war." (Publishers Weekly)
“Place: Beirut. Time: 1970s. But Rawi Hage’s Beirut Hellfire Society is, actually, deeply set in any place consumed by killing and death during any time in human history. Fire is Beirut Hellfire Society’s elemental core—inherited fires of grief and sorrow, justice and love. Fantastically framed, its envisioned images and scenes burn with a mythic intensity not easily forgotten. Truly a masterpiece.” (Lawrence Joseph, author of So Where Are We?: Poems)
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Story
From a variety of masterfully rendered perspectives, these six stories depict people at painful odds with the world around them. A wife can only surrender to a desert night by betraying her husband. An artist struggles to honor his own aspirations as well as society's expectations of him. A missionary brutally converted to the worship of a tribal fetish is left with but an echo of his identity. Whether set in North Africa, Paris, or Brazil, the stories in Exile and the Kingdom are probing portraits of spiritual exile, and man's perpetual search for an inner kingdom.
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So good!
- By Christopher A. Douglas on 10-24-24
By: Albert Camus
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Creatures of Passage
- By: Morowa Yejidé
- Narrated by: Morowa Yejidé
- Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Nephthys Kinwell is a taxi driver of sorts in Washington, DC, ferrying passengers in a 1967 Plymouth Belvedere with a ghost in the trunk. Endless rides and alcohol help her manage her grief over the death of her twin brother, Osiris, who was murdered and dumped in the Anacostia River. Unknown to Nephthys when the novel opens in 1977, her estranged great-nephew, 10-year-old Dash, is finding himself drawn to the banks of that very same river. It is there that Dash has charmed conversations with a mysterious figure he calls the "River Man".
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This is the one
- By just_watching on 04-27-21
By: Morowa Yejidé
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Virgins of Paradise
- By: Barbara Wood
- Narrated by: Joyce Bean
- Length: 19 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Jasmine and Camelia Rasheed grow to womanhood under the watchful eye of their grandmother inside the walls surrounding a beautiful house on Virgins of Paradise Street in exotic Cairo. They come of age in society in which the subjugation of women is assumed - they must wear veils, are forbidden to leave the house, have no independent rights, and are circumcised to ensure purity and obedience.
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eye opening
- By C Ohana on 11-13-08
By: Barbara Wood
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The Saturday Night Ghost Club
- A Novel
- By: Craig Davidson
- Narrated by: Corey Brill
- Length: 5 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Growing up in 1980s Niagara Falls - a seedy but magical, slightly haunted place - Jake Baker spends most of his time with his uncle Calvin, a kind but eccentric enthusiast of occult artifacts and conspiracy theories. The summer Jake turns 12, he befriends a pair of siblings new to town, and so Calvin decides to initiate them all into the "Saturday Night Ghost Club." But as the summer goes on, what begins as a seemingly light-hearted project may ultimately uncover more than any of its members had imagined.
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Emotionless
- By Noura on 10-18-20
By: Craig Davidson
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The Third Daughter
- A Novel
- By: Talia Carner
- Narrated by: Saskia Maarleveld
- Length: 10 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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The turn of the 20th century finds 14-year-old Batya in the Russian countryside, fleeing with her family endless pogroms. Desperate, her father leaps at the opportunity to marry Batya to a worldly, wealthy stranger who can guarantee his daughter an easy life and passage to America. Feeling like a princess in a fairytale, Batya leaves her old life behind as she is whisked away to a new world. But soon, she discovers that she’s entered a waking nightmare. Her new “husband” does indeed bring her to America.
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brilliant novel based on shocking truth
- By Rochelle Jewel Shapiro on 07-05-20
By: Talia Carner
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What You Have Heard Is True
- A Memoir of Witness and Resistance
- By: Carolyn Forché
- Narrated by: Carolyn Forché
- Length: 12 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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What You Have Heard is True is a devastating, lyrical, and visionary memoir about a young woman’s brave choice to engage with horror in order to help others. Written by one of the most gifted poets of her generation, this is the story of a woman’s radical act of empathy, and her fateful encounter with an intriguing man who changes the course of her life.
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Beautiful story
- By Norhilda on 05-09-19
By: Carolyn Forché
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The Traitor
- By: V.S. Alexander
- Narrated by: Christa Lewis
- Length: 11 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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In the summer of 1942, as war rages across Europe, a series of anonymous leaflets appears around the University of Munich, speaking out against escalating Nazi atrocities. The leaflets are hidden in public places, or mailed to addresses selected at random from the phone book. Natalya Petrovich, a student, knows who is behind the leaflets - a secret group called the White Rose, led by siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl and their friends. As a volunteer nurse on the Russian front, Natalya witnessed the horrors of war first-hand. She willingly enters the White Rose's circle....
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Not all the Germans are guilty.
- By Judy Harley on 09-18-20
By: V.S. Alexander