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6:00 PM, EDT

Song for the Missing

Reading and Discussion|Reading and Discussion with Pierre Jarawan

  • Foyer of the Social Innovation Workshop, Ottawa

  • English, German
  • Free admission

Pierre Jarawan "Song for the Missing" © World Editions

In collaboration with the German Embassy in Ottawa and World Editions

Reading and discussion with Pierre Jarawan moderated by Jörg Esleben

Discussion in English. Excerpts of the novel will be read in English, French and German. Questions may also be asked in French and German.

“A love letter to Lebanon and its people—a deft, sensitive book that steers clear of ‘oriental’ clichés, with a poetic narrative voice.”
Daniel Speck, screenwriter

« This moving novel is dedicated to 17,000 people who disappeared without trace during 15 years of civil war. But Jarawan also depicts the beauty and poetry of the country and recalls the great tradition of the Hakawati, the Arab storytellers. » Madame

« On several time levels, Pierre Jarawan tells masterfully and warm-heartedly about the wounds of war, repressed traumas and the attitude towards life of a generation with limited hope. » Abendzeitung München

A sensitive and mysterious novel on friendship, family and destruction
 

It’s 2011 and the Arab Spring is in full bloom when the discovery of two bodies in Beirut sows the first seeds of unrest in Lebanon. With houses already burning, Amin sets out to write down his memories of the country: Of the year 1994, when he returned as a teenager with his grandmother, twelve years after his parents’ deaths. Of his friendship with Jafar, the boy who explored the desolate postwar landscape with him. And of the painful discovery that there will never be certainty—neither about his friend’s past nor his family’s history. In this novel full of mystery and suspense, friendship and loss, searches and secrets, Jarawan skillfully interweaves a deeply personal story with the tumultuous history of the Middle East.

Pierre Jarawan

Pierre Jarawan was born in 1985 to a Lebanese father and a German mother and moved to Germany with his family at the age of three. Inspired by his father’s imaginative bedtime stories, he started writing at the age of thirteen. He has won international prizes as a slam poet, and in 2016 was named Literature Star of the Year by the daily newspaper Abendzeitung. Jarawan received a literary scholarship from the City of Munich (the Bayerischer Kunstförderpreis) for The Storyteller, which went on to become a bestseller and booksellers’ favorite in Germany, the Netherlands, France, and Brazil. Song for the Missing is his second novel.

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