Review Excerpt:

“Opulent and picaresque . . . In this grand saga of a Beirut family with Armenian, English, and Druze roots, Alameddine constructs stories within stories that encompass the world of the jinni, the tales of Abraham and Hagar, the legendary pigeon wars of Urfa, Lebanon’s brutal civil war, and post-9/11 Beirut and L.A. At the center of this matrix is Osama al-Kharrat (his last name means exaggerator), grandson of a hakawati and son of a wealthy car dealer and a glamorous, sharp-tongued mother, one of many resplendently witty and wily women characters. . . . [Osama’s] arrival [in Beirut] sets off a cascade of memories and launches 1,001 stories. The most thrilling involve the legendary Fatima, the hero Baybars, Osama’s bon vivant uncle Jihad, and the hakawati himself, not to neglect the many diverting parables. Alameddine, himself a brilliant hakawati, exuberantly reclaims and celebrates the art of wisdom of the war-torn Middle East in this stupendous, ameliorating, many-chambered palace of a novel.”