“I took a slow, unfaltering breath, but how much grief could one inhale ... I was overwhelmed with the ignominy of living Lebanese,” says Raja, the main character in Rabih Alameddine’s seventh novel, the day after the 2020 Beirut port explosion. Raja has a sweeping brush in hand, carried from home in the hope of cleaning the streets. Instead, the devastation he is faced with causes him to break down in tears, only to realise that he will not have to shoulder his pain alone.
This is a decades-long story of Lebanon, a “nation of thieves ... run by mafias for generations” and “bordered by more avaricious and murderous governments”. Like his most famous work, An Unnecessary Woman, Alameddine’s latest novel focuses on a specific, literary-minded Beirut-based character: this time a gay philosophy teacher and writer of a one-off Japanese-language hit who stands somewhat on the edge of society, though his walls are steadily being worn away.
This is a story about reckoning with painful past events (trigger warning), and a love story too, between a mother and her son. Zalfa’s “incompatible” husband has died and Raja’s estranged dentist brother has fleeced her of everything she owned. She moves into Raja’s apartment, after which she both gets high and befriends the head of the local generator mafia. The introduction of Madame Taweel’s character – like various others – also makes this a look at the people who are left behind in a place like Beirut: a city faced by ongoing crises, where so many emigrate from.
Alameddine’s writing is sublime on a sentence level. He manages to oscillate between wit, emotional depth, and pointed description, adding a pinch of one or the other with just a few select words. He makes writing look easy, though only a master craftsperson could produce this book.
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The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) won the 2025 US National Book Award for fiction. In his acceptance speech, Alameddine thanked “the friends and family who support me even though I plagiarise their lives and steal their stories”; his psychiatrist; and his drug dealers. Judging chair Rumaan Alam said they had set out to provide “the culture itself with a measure of what fiction is in 2025”.
That measure incorporates trauma and humour, cruelty and love, in a book that may not document a real human experience, but feels deeply human.
