Rights sold to Italy (Gremese)

The cosmopolitan Beirut is abuzz at nightfall. The whole city is preparing to watch the Germany-Ghana match in the 2010 World Cup. This world-in-a-city is the natural setting for this novel in which individual loneliness is confronted with the confusion of an ultra-connected generation linked by social networks but not properly attached.  Six characters, girls and boys, meet, miss, pass each other by, fall in love, fall out of love in a Beirut that is indefinable as it hovers between Westernisation and tradition. A city full of excesses, of nights with no tomorrows, nightclubs open to the night sky and the opalescent glow of mobile phone and television screens: the artificial lights borne by the nocturnal birds who are the characters in this Lebanese Bonjour Tristesse.

Diane Mazloum brings us a contemporary, intimist novel against a background with high stakes of love and death. Its war baby characters on the eve of their thirties are described in suave, sensual prose, as if Beirut itself were human skin flawed with fine scars that are almost invisible and yet terribly real.

Diane Mazloum was born in Paris in 1979 and grew up in Rome. After studying astrophysics in Paris, she went to the Lebanon where she finished studies in design at the American university. She now lives in Beirut.