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1980s, 2000s: A son tries to find out about his father’s life in Lebanon
The Only Café
What you need to know before your trail
Pierre Cormier had secrets. Though he married twice, became a high-flying lawyer and a father, he didn’t let anyone really know him. And he was especially silent about what had happened to him in Lebanon, the country he fled during civil war to come to Canada as a refugee. When, in the midst of a corporate scandal, he went missing after his boat exploded, his teenaged son Cyril didn’t know how to mourn him. But five years later, a single bone and a distinctive gold chain are recovered, and Pierre is at last declared dead. Which changes everything.
Travel Guide
Travel BookTrail style from Lebanon to Toronto and The Only Cafe
Toronto
At the reading of the will, it turns out that instead of a funeral, Pierre wanted a “roast” at a bar no one knew he frequented—The Only Café in Toronto’s east end. He’d even left a guest list that included one mysterious name: Ari. Cyril, now working as an intern for a major national newsroom and assisting on reporting a story on homegrown terrorism, tracks down Ari at the bar, and finds out that he is an Israeli who knew his father in Lebanon in the ’80s.
“The Only Café was quiet. He stood at the bar, ordered a beer, watched the door. He wasn’t sure what brought him back. Perhaps the wall of memory, 1982, perhaps the suspicion that the fat stranger, Ari, might know something from behind that – so far – impenetrable wall. There was no sign of him.”
Lebanon
Who is Ari? What can he reveal about what happened to Pierre in Lebanon? Is Pierre really dead? Can Ari even be trusted? Soon Cyril’s personal investigation is entangled in the larger news story, all of it twining into a fabric of lies and deception that stretches from contemporary Toronto back to the massacre at the Sabra and Shatila camps in Lebanon in September 1982.
“The past is never dead as long as there is memory. Memory is the afterlife, both heaven and hell.”
Booktrail Boarding Pass: The Only Cafe
Destination: Lebanon, Toronto Author/Guide: Lebanon, Toronto Departure Time: 1980s, 2000s
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