"A Borzoi book"

"Chapter 10 was previously published in Zoetrope, in slightly different form, as 'In-country' ".--T.p. verso.

An interweaving of five separate narratives: the story of a Lebanese American returning to Beirut to attend to his dying father; the al-Kharrat family’s rise to prominence; the Mameluk warrior Baybars; the mythic Fatima, who became the consort of the jinni Afrit-Jehanam; and, the disintegration of a tolerant, civilized Lebanon into a battleground for competing religions, ethnicities, and ideologies. Each story is further enhanced by smaller ones about raising pigeons and playing traditional melodies as well as tales drawn from the Koran, the Bible, The Arabian Nights, Ovid, and Shakespeare.

In 2003, Osama al-Kharrat returns to Beirut after many years in America to stand vigil at his father's deathbed. The city is a shell of the Beirut Osama remembers, but he and his friends and family take solace in the things that have always sustained them: gossip, laughter, and, above all, stories. Osama's grandfather was a hakawati, or storyteller, and his bewitching stories--of his arrival in Lebanon, an orphan of the Turkish wars, and of how he earned the name al-Kharrat, the fibster--are interwoven with classic tales of the Middle East, stunningly reimagined. Here are Abraham and Isaac; Ishmael, father of the Arab tribes; the ancient, fabled Fatima; and Baybars, the slave prince who vanquished the Crusaders. Here, too, are contemporary Lebanese whose stories tell a larger, heartbreaking tale of seemingly endless war--and of survival.--From publisher description.