The Frankfurt Book Fair New York has selected The Storyteller by Pierre Jarawan, translated by Sinéad Crowe and Rachel McNicholl (World Editions, $17.99, 9781642860115) as its March Book of the Month.
The organization described the book this way: "Samir leaves the safety and comfort of his family's adopted home in Germany for volatile Beirut in an attempt to find his missing father. His only clues are an old photo and the bedtime stories his father used to tell him. The Storyteller follows Samir's search for Brahim, the father whose heart was always yearning for his homeland, Lebanon. In this moving and gripping novel about family secrets, love, and friendship, Pierre Jarawan does for Lebanon what Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner did for Afghanistan. He pulls away the curtain of grim facts and figures to reveal the intimate story of an exiled family torn apart by civil war and guilt. In this rich and skillful account, Jarawan proves that he too is a masterful storyteller."
Pierre Jarawan was born to a Lebanese father and a German mother and moved to Germany with his family at age three. Inspired by his father's imaginative bedtime stories, he started writing at the age of 13. He has won international prizes as a slam poet, and in 2016 was named Literature Star of the Year by the Abendzeitung newspaper. Jarawan received a literary scholarship from the City of Munich (the Bayerischer Kunstförderpreis) for The Storyteller, which has been a bestseller in Germany and the Netherlands.
Sinéad Crowe is a native of Dublin, Ireland, and works as a freelance translator in Hamburg, Germany. Her short-story translations have appeared in the Short Story Project, and her translation of Ronen Steinke's Fritz Bauer oder Auschwitz vor Gericht is forthcoming from Indiana University Press.
Rachel McNicholl is a freelance translator and editor in Dublin, Ireland. Her translations have appeared in journals and anthologies including The Stinging Fly, Manoa, No Man's Land, Best European Fiction and the Short Story Project. Her translation of Nadja Spiegel's short-story collection sometimes i lie and sometimes i don't was published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2015. She won a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant in 2016. Last year, she had a funded residency at the Europäisches Übersetzer-Kollegium in Straelen, Germany, during which she worked on the final stages of The Storyteller translation.