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A young Lebanese man in Paris recognizes an old man on the Metro as a face from his school history book; someone who had left the Lebanon during World War II to fight with the Resistance in France. The elderly Ossayne responds to the young man's friendly approach, and soon is telling his life story. This begins long before his birth, in the house of a deposed sovereign whose suicide causes his daughter to lose her wits. The daughter is Ossayne's grandmother, and he describes his father's privileged upbringing in an Ottoman household in Adana, which ends in 1909, when, in a gesture of rebellion, the young Turkish aristocrat flees with his Armenian tutor to Mont Lebanon. He marries his tutor's daughter, and they call their son Ossayne, a name which represents his father's protest against a history of sectarianism and violence. During the Resistance Ossayne marries a beautiful Jewish woman and moves to Haifa, but there is a cruel fate in store for this happy young couple. Malouf's first novel to have a contemporary setting dramatizes the conflict and anarchy that have beset his native Lebanon in the past century through the story of one man's life. It is also a beautiful work of fiction that tells a poignant love story. (Kirkus UK)
