Anti Lebanon: A Novel

(Paperback)

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Description

The criminal and the victim alike return to the scene of the crime...It is the Arab Spring and the fate of the Christians of the Middle East is uncertain. The many Christians of Lebanon walk a knife edge, their very survival in this ancestral refuge in doubt. When Hezbollah flex their muscles in a takeover of west Beirut, amid the old shell-scarred sandstone villas, the echoing gunfire, a young Christian wandering the emptied streets is entrapped in an act of violence that will awaken monsters from the civil war and beyond. Anti Lebanon is a cross-genre political thriller and horror story embedded within recent events, featuring a multiethnic Christian family living out the lingering after-effects of Lebanon's war, as it struggles to deal with its phantoms, its ghosts, and its vampires. "Combining a thriller and a horror story into a single melancholic narrative, Shuker has created a haunting and riveting account of war, loss, and exile." --PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

Reviews

Praise for Anti Lebanon "Anti Lebanon is an extremely exciting book. It seems to suggest we can go anywhere with the novel, that it can contain anything. It's masterful in its form and the story it tells is compelling, original and important." --Pip Adam, Scoop Review of Books "One cannot help but be captivated by the slow, mournful mood and atmosphere of Shuker's Beirut. Combining a thriller and a horror story into a single melancholic narrative, Shuker has created a haunting and riveting account of war, loss, and exile." --Publishers Weekly Praise for Carl Shuker "Brash and fearless, The Method Actors is a self-consciously postmodern challenge to our perceived reality and its fictional depiction... Virtually every one of his book's 500 pages has something worth lingering over." --NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW "A tremendous stylist and a tremendous observer... again and again I stopped to admire particular sentences and paragraphs." --STEPHEN DOBYNS, THE CHURCH OF DEAD GIRLS "I admire Shuker's bravura attentiveness to the little things as much as I do his shameless and bracing bid for a Pynchonesque grand slam." --GEOFFREY WOLFF, DUKE OF DECEPTION "It's difficult to convey here the thrill of Shuker's writing, with its up-to-the-minute feel, its endless audacity ... with its defiant difficulty, sly ambition and writing more than sharp enough to live up to its own hype." --SAM FINNEMORE, THE LISTENER "A mesmerizing opus ... a serious accomplishment." --THE AV CLUB

Author Bio

CARL SHUKER was born in New Zealand in 1974, and lived many years in Tokyo before settling in London with his wife and daughter. His first novel, The Method Actors, was awarded the Prize in Modern Letters in 2006, the richest prize in the world for an emerging writer. His second novel, the cult classic The Lazy Boys, was published by Counterpoint in 2007. Three Novellas for a Novel was published in limited edition online in 2008 and he is 2013 writer in residence at Victoria University of Wellington.