The Only Café
Page 35
I found useful detail and texture in Robert Hatem’s controversial memoir, From Israel to Damascus. The report of the Kahan Commission of Inquiry into the massacre at Sabra and Shatila, September 16-18, 1982, offers rare, if incomplete, forensic accountability by those responsible. Many of the scenes in this novel have been reconstructed from my own experience as a reporter making periodic visits to Lebanon between 1982 and 2005. On one such visit I witnessed the immediate aftermath of the Sabra and Shatila atrocities in September 1982, and reported them for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
I am indebted to many people for their work and for their patience as I thought and spoke and wrote my way through a complex and, at times, emotional reconstruction of a murky and still-unresolved chapter of the history of the Middle East. I reserve my deepest gratitude for my editor and publisher, Anne Collins, whose help was indispensable in my shaping of this story/commentary on the tragic history of a vital country, Lebanon.
Special thanks to Helal Endisha and Andre Mekhtfi. And profound appreciation to Tal Regev, bartender/cook/resident-mystic, and James O’Donnell, proprietor, at The Only Café.
Linden MacIntyre
Toronto, January 2017
LINDEN MACINTYRE’s bestselling first novel, The Long Stretch, was nominated for a CBA Libris Award and his boyhood memoir, Causeway: A Passage from Innocence, won both the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Nonfiction and the Evelyn Richardson Prize. His second novel, The Bishop’s Man, was a #1 national bestseller, won the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Dartmouth Book Award and the CBA Libris Fiction Book of the Year Award, among other honours. The third book in the loose-knit trilogy, Why Men Lie, was also a #1 national bestseller as well as a Globe and Mail “Can’t Miss” Book. His previous novel, Punishment, was a Globe and Mail national bestseller. MacIntyre, who spent twenty-four years as the co-host of the fifth estate, is a distinguished broadcast journalist who has won ten Gemini awards for his work.