Older Brother

Mahir Guven

Okt. 2019 · Europa Editions

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Prix Goncourt Winner: A “superb” novel of a Syrian immigrant in France and his two sons (The New York Times Book Review).

Older Brother is the poignant story of a Franco-Syrian family whose father and two sons try to integrate themselves into a society that doesn’t offer them many opportunities.

The father, an atheist communist who moved from Syria to France for his studies and stayed for love, has worked for decades driving a taxi to support his family. The eldest son is a driver for an app-based car service, which comically puts him at odds with his father, whose very livelihood is threatened by this new generation of disruptors. The younger son, shy and serious, works as a nurse in a French hospital. Jaded by the regular rejections he encounters in French society, he decides to join a Muslim humanitarian organization to help wounded civilians in the war in Syria. But when he stops sending news home, the silence begins to eat away at his father and brother, who wonder what his real motivations were. And when the younger brother returns home, he has changed . . .

“A masterpiece of a first novel.” —The Guardian

“A striking debut that reveals the breadth of emotional disconnection that prejudice can stoke within a family.” —Kirkus Reviews

Autoren-Profil

Mahir Guven was born in 1986 in Nantes, the stateless child of refugees, his mother from Turkey and his Kurdish father from Iraq. He grew up with his grandmother between the city and vineyards. Older Brother, his first novel, was awarded the Goncourt First Novel Prize in 2018.

Tina Kover’s translations for Europa include Négar Djavadi’s National Book Award-shortlisted novel, Disoriental, Anna Gavalda’s Life, Only Better, and The Little Girl on the Ice Floe by Adélaïde Bon. Kover is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship for the translation of Manette Salomon by the Goncourt brothers.