Winner of the 2025 National Book Award for Fiction, The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) is a novel as expansive, funny, and poignant as its title promises. With his signature wit and irreverence, Rabih Alameddine (The Angel of History) charts decades of Beiruti history and trauma through the life of his narrator, Raja, a reclusive, aging teacher of French philosophy.
The story opens and closes in 2023, when Raja shares his apartment with his overbearing but deeply endearing mother, Zalfa. The bulk of its sections jump back in time: to the pre-civil-war 1960s, Lebanon's civil war in 1975, the banking collapse and Covid-19 epidemic, and Raja's ill-fated trip to the United States for an artists' residency in Virginia. Raja is a knowing, purposeful narrator, as well as self-deprecating--naming himself the Gullible, the Imbecile, the Neurotic Clown, the Dimwit.
He and his mother bicker constantly, foul-mouthed but fiercely loving. Bawdy, rude, and impossibly sweet, with "a laugh so delightful, so impetuous, so luminous," Raja's mother is the indomitable star of this loving, heart-wrenching novel. --Julia Kastner, blogger at pagesofjulia