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. 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. 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.
It is 1978 in Beirut, Lebanon, partway through that country's Civil War. 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.LONGLISTED FOR THE SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZEįINALIST FOR THE GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARD FOR FICTIONįINALIST FOR THE ROGERS WRITERS' TRUST FICTION PRIZEĪn explosive new novel from the award-winning, bestselling author of De Niro's Game and Cockroach, and only the second Canadian (after Alistair Macleod) to win the prestigious Dublin IMPAC Literary Award. It asks what, if anything, can be accomplished or preserved in the face of certain change and imminent death. 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.ĭeftly 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.
LONGLISTED FOR THE SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZEįINALIST FOR THE GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARD FOR FICTIONįINALIST FOR THE ROGERS WRITERS' TRUST FICTION PRIZEĪn explosive new novel from the award-winning, bestselling author of De Niro's Game and Cockroach, and only the second Canadian (after Alistair Macleod) to win the prestigious Dublin IMPAC Literary Award.
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