Carnival A Novel

In the Carnival city there are two types of taxi drivers: the spiders and the flies. The spiders patiently wait for the calls to come. But the flies are wanderers-they roam the streets, looking for the raised flags of hands. Fly is a wanderer, raised in the circus, the son of a golden-haired trapeze artist and a flying-carpet man. From his taxi he sees the world in all its carnivalesque beauty and ugliness. Hunger and injustice claw at the city, and books provide the only true shelter. And when the Carnival starts, all limits dissolve, and a gunshot goes off. . . . With all the beauty, truth, rage, and peripatetic storytelling that have made Rawi Hage an international publishing sensation and a writer with "dark and uncompromising vision" (Colm Tóibín), Carnival is a stirring tour de force.