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Yalo /

Award-winning author Elias Khoury's latest novel is a searing look at truth and memory, love and transcendence, told through the contradictory confessions of a young Lebanese prisoner.

During the Lebanese civil war in the 1980s, a young man is arrested and charged with rape. Repeatedly interrogated and tortured, Yalo is forced--like Scheherazade--to tell a different story each day to stay alive. As he battles to understand his past and the forces that have shaped him, he comes to discover his own voice and the true Yalo begins to emerge. This is a searing look at truth and memory, love and transcendence, from one of our most important Arab novelists.

Khoury, Elias

GMD	BOOK
Classification	F KHO
Publisher	Picador, 2008
Subject	FictionPrisonerprisonsTortureSocial JusticeLebanonMiddle EastFiction / War & MilitaryPolice BrutalityArabic
ISBN	9780312428686
URL

Notes

Review
★ "Los Angeles has Joan Didion and Raymond Chandler, and Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk. The beautiful, resilient city of Beirut belongs to Khoury." ―Laila Lalami, Los Angeles Times

★ "In Lebanon, there is passion and there is blood. Elias Khoury's new novel, Yalo, heavy with both, is a dizzying journey into the extremes of human experience--into the intense sensuality and stomach-turning violence." ―Adam LeBor, The New York Times Book Review

★ "Memserizing ... As bold a gambit as Nabokov's tale about Humbert Humbert in Lolita . . . A vortex of memory and self-deceit, which Khoury beautifully portrays." ―John Freeman, The Denver Post

★ "No Lebanese writer has been more successful than Elias Khoury in telling the story of Lebanon. . . . Khoury is one of the msot inventive novelists in the Arab world." ―Samir El-Youssef, The Washington Post Book World

★ "Yalo is replete with vivid description ... Khoury builds a splintering narrative structure of imagination, memory, brutality, speculation, and delusion." ―Drake Stutesman, Bookforum

★ "Yalo speaks to our universal humanity, to our profound longing for a realization of self and connection to others. That such a vision should, at this moment in history, come to the American reading public from a great Arab novelist makes this an extremely important publishing event." ―Robert Olen Butler