Carnival

IMPAC award-winning Rawi Hage explores the hidden underbelly of a colourful city in a novel of dark comedy and deep compassion

There are two types of taxi driver in the Carnival city - the spiders and the flies. The spiders sit and stew in their cars, waiting for the calls to come to them. But the flies wander the streets, looking for the raised flags of hands.

Fly is a wanderer. From the seat of his taxi we see the world in all of its carnivalesque beauty and ugliness. We meet criminals, prostitutes, madmen, revolutionaries, ordinary people going to extraordinary places. With all of the beauty, truth, rage, and peripatetic storytelling that have made his first two novels international sensations, Carnival is a tour de force that will make all of life’s passengers squirm in their backseats.