I, the Divine

8vo. Pp. [vi], 308, [1]. Printed wraps.

First published in Britain in 2002 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Author's second novel. A cross-cultural memoir, of repeated false starts, reminiscent of Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (1981), and set between war-torn Lebanon and America. "The story of Sarah, half Lebanese and half American, named by her grandfather after the "divine" Sarah Bernhardt, is told entirely in first chapters, as Sarah begins and then abandons her memoir over and over again. Not only is it brilliantly executed, it is so convincing that it feels like the only valid way that Alameddine could have told Sarah's story." –The Times