26@26: Hala Alyan & Marcello Di Cintio

The Arsonists’ City delivers all the pleasures of a good old-fashioned saga, but in Alyan’s hands, one family’s tale becomes the story of a nation – Lebanon and Syria, yes, but also the United States. It’s the kind of book we are lucky to have.” –Rumaan Alam

A rich family story, a personal look at the legacy of war in the Middle East, and an indelible rendering of how we hold on to the people and places we call home.

The Nasr family is spread across the globe – Beirut, Brooklyn, Austin, the California desert. A Syrian mother, a Lebanese father, and three American children: all have lived a life of migration. Still, they’ve always had their ancestral home in Beirut – a constant touchstone – and the complicated, messy family love that binds them. But following his father's recent death, Idris, the family's new patriarch, has decided to sell.

The decision brings the family to Beirut, where everyone unites against Idris in a fight to save the house. They all have secrets – lost loves, bitter jealousies, abandoned passions, deep-set shame – that distance has helped smother. But in a city smouldering with the legacy of war, an ongoing flow of refugees, religious tension, and political protest, those secrets ignite, imperilling the fragile ties that hold this family together.

In a novel teeming with wisdom, warmth, and characters born of remarkable human insight, award-winning author Hala Alyan shows us again that “fiction is often the best filter for the real world around us” (NPR).

An astonishing book about folks from all over, many of whom have been through total hell but have somehow made their way out... You never know who's driving you. Each person contains multitudes.” –Margaret Atwood

In conversations with drivers ranging from veterans of foreign wars to Indigenous women protecting one another, Di Cintio explores the borderland of the North American taxi.

“A taxi,” writes Di Cintio, “is a border.” Inside every cab is a space both private and public: accessible to all, and yet, once the doors close, strangely intimate, as two strangers who might otherwise never have met share a five or fifty minute trip. In a series of interviews with Canadian taxi drivers, their backgrounds ranging from the Iraqi National Guard, to the Westboro Baptist Church, to an arranged marriage that left one woman stranded in a foreign country, Di Cintio seeks out those missed conversations, revealing the untold lives of the people who take us where we want to go.