Yalo
Elias Khoury
Quercus, 320pp, £17.99

Politics and passion in a Beirut shaken by the legacy of the civil war are at the heart of this harrowing novel by the Lebanese-born author of the acclaimed Gate of the Sun.Yalo is sensitively translated from the Arabic by Humphrey Davies, who notes how “complex” is the terminology of the Assyrian people and their language. The novel is morally and philosophically, as well as linguistically, complex.

It is 1992 and the bewildered ex-soldier Yalo is accused of rape and robbery, and is taken on a bloody “torture journey” in order to extract a confession. Yalo is forced to write down his life story and the fluid narrative spirals into those moments that made – and unmade – him. This compelling story questions the very nature of storytelling. Words seem to promise a path to psychological liberation from guilt, fear and longing. Most powerful in this evocative novel are the smell of incense, the taste of cherries and the sight of blood, as Khoury unflinchingly chronicles how human beings can turn into savage beasts.

Anita Sethi

Cockroach
Rawi Hage
Hamish Hamilton, 320pp, £14.99

The Arab narrator of the Canadian writer Rawi Hage’s second novel is roped in to having therapy after trying to commit suicide one harsh winter by hanging himself from a tree. Over the course of this gripping narrative, he is forced to disclose his dark past. As a child, he would pretend to be a cockroach, an identity still imprinted deeply on him: he feels marginalised, hated and hating, and yearns to be underground. He sees himself as a “master of escape”, eschewing a “cruel and insane” world of his mother’s tears, his father’s belt and his teacher’s ruler. Stealing, this self-confessed thief explains, was a form of release.

This is a vivid portrait of a disaffected mind, forced to face the very things it has tried to ignore. Contemptuous of the world around him, he nonetheless needs to “possess every female of the species”. In his depictions of man, woman and beast, Hage shows himself to be a humane and compassionate storyteller, sensitive to how, in the words of Isidore Saint-Hilaire, “what we call species are various degenerations of the same type”.

AS

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