A DAZZLING MYSTERY SET IN THE WORLD OF LEBANON'S BOOK PUBLISHING INDUSTRY—Farid Abou Cha'r arrives in Beirut on a hot summer morning with his manuscript, looking for a publisher. He is turned down by all of them—"nobody reads anymore," he is told. Instead, he accepts a job as a proofreader at the famous old print house "Karam Bros.," allegedly established in 1908. Disappointed by the menial tasks of checking catalogs and ad copy, Farid secretly hopes that his book will eventually be published. His manuscript never leaves his side until one day it disappears and then reemerges, beautifully printed. Farid soon realizes that the expensive paper it's printed on is the same that the company is using to manufacture fake twenty-euro bills, and that the person who printed the book is none other than his boss's wife. Entangled in a police investigation and an illicit flirtation, Farid discovers that the Karam Bros. print house is not what it seems. Douaihy dizzies the reader...

On 16 June 1957, a shoot-out in a village church in northern Lebanon leaves two dozen people dead. In the aftermath of the massacre, the town is rent in two: the Al-Ramis in the north and their rivals the Al-Samaeenis in the south. But lives once so closely intertwined cannot easily be divided. Neighbours turn into enemies and husbands and wives are forced to choose between loyalty to each other and loyalty to their clan.Drawing on an actual killing that took place in his home town, Douaihy reconstructs that June day from the viewpoints of people who witnessed the killing or whose lives were forever altered by it. A young girl overhears her father lending his gun to his cousins, but refusing to accompany them to the church. A school boy walks past the dead bodies, laid out in the town square on beds brought out from the houses. A baker whose shop is trapped on the wrong side of the line hopes the women who buy his bread will protect him. At the center of the portrait is...