De Niro's Game

Bassam and George are childhood best friends who have grown up on the Christian side of war-torn Beirut. Now on the verge of adulthood, they must choose their futures: to remain in the exhausted, corrupt city of their birth, or to go into exile abroad, cut off from the only existence they have known.

De Niro's Game is the stunning winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the very first novel by up-and-coming Lebanese literary star Rawi Hage, also author of Cockroach.

Bassam and George are childhood best friends who have grown up on the Christian side of war-torn Beirut. Now on the verge of adulthood, they must choose their futures: to remain in the exhausted, corrupt city of their birth, or to go into exile abroad, cut off from the only existence they have known.

Bassam chooses one path - obsessed with leaving Beirut, he embarks on a series of petty crimes to fund his escape to the West. Meanwhile, George amasses power in the underworld of the city, embracing a life of military service, organised crime, killing, and drugs. But their two paths inevitably
collide, with explosive consequences.

De Niro's Game is Rawi Hage's devastating, timely portrait of two young men and an entire city formed and deformed by war.

'A large and unsettling talent' Guardian

'A masterpiece . . . writing cannot really get much better' Literary Review

'Hollywood noir meets opium dreams in a blasted landscape of war-wasted young lives' Boston Globe

'The most subtly nuanced, psychologically compelling book about the corrosive effects of war to be written for a long time . . .The descriptions of the city are so skilful you can taste the dust in the air' Financial Times


Rawi Hage was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and lived through nine years of the Lebanese civil war. He is the author of De Niro's Game, which won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; Cockroach, which was the winner of the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize and also listed for various other prizes; and Carnival, to be published by Hamish Hamilton/ Penguin in April 2013. He lives in Montreal.