Mister N has checked himself into a hotel. Anyway, he’s pretty sure it’s a hotel. His rooms are simple, as are his needs. Meanwhile on the streets below, there is only the grim pageant of modern-day Beirut: poverty, violence, and fear.
Why has Mister N left his comfortable apartment to brave the world beyond? The embarrassing truth is that Mister N used to write novels — until the very act of writing began to disgust him. If he’s ever going to overcome this aversion to his vocation he’ll need to be able to focus on his work, and perhaps this new venue will help eliminate distractions? But it seems Mister N is his own worst enemy: he can’t get his thoughts in order, let alone tune out his new neighbours, who insist on tormenting him with their endless talk, their dinner invitations, their inconvenient suicides. Worst of all, Mister N has stumbled across one of his own fictional characters — a brutal militiaman and torturer — running a seemingly innocuous internet café…
“A singular thriller of identity that keeps the reader in suspense until the shattering final reversal.” – Le Monde des Livres
“It’s as though Najwa Barakat wanted to embody, in the person of her lunatic hero, all the chaos, the surfeit of suffering being experienced by her homeland and by her fellow citizens. And she does so with remarkable ingenuity.” – Liberation
“With this novel, Lebanese author Najwa Barakat leads us into a psychological puzzle . . . part Shutter Island, part Jorge Luis Borges.” – Le Courrier de l’Atlas
Najwa Barakat was born in Lebanon in 1961. After receiving a degree in theatre at the Fine Arts Institute in Beirut, she moved to Paris and studied cinema at Le Conservatoire Libre du Cinema Français. She has hosted cultural programs produced by Radio France Internationale (RFI), the BBC, and Al Jazeera, and is the author of seven novels as well as the Arabic translator of Albert Camus’s notebooks. She lives in Paris.
Translator Luke Leafgren is an Assistant Dean of Harvard College. He has published five translations of Arabic novels and received the 2018 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation for his English edition of Muhsin Al-Ramli’s The President’s Gardens.
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