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Scotiabank Giller prize-winner Linden MacIntyre is again with a timely and gripping book when a son tries to resolve the enigma of his father's death - a guy who tried but cannot forget a troubled history in his native Lebanon. Pierre Cormier experienced secrets. Though he committed twice and became a high-flying attorney and a father, he didn't let anyone really know him. And he was especially silent in what had took place to him in Lebanon, the country he fled during civil warfare to come quickly to Canada as a refugee. When, amid a corporate scandal, he went missing after his sail boat exploded, his teenage boy Cyril didn't learn how to mourn him. But five years later, an individual bone and a unique gold chain are recovered, and Pierre is at last declared inactive. Which changes everything. In the reading of the will, as it happens that instead of a funeral, Pierre sought a "roast" at a club no one understood he frequented - The Only Café in Toronto's east end. He'd even kept a visitor list that included one inexplicable name: Ari. Cyril, now working as an intern for a major national newsroom and assisting on reporting a story on homegrown terrorism, songs down Ari at the club and finds out that he's an Israeli who understood his father in Lebanon in the '80s. Who is Ari? What can he disclose about what took place to Pierre in Lebanon? Is Pierre really inactive? Can Ari even be respected? Soon Cyril's personal research is entangled in the larger news story, all of it twining into a fabric of lies and deception that exercises from contemporary Toronto back to the massacre at the Sabra and Shatila camps in Lebanon in September 1982. The Only Café is both a moving enigma and an illuminating exploration of the way the traumatic history, if kept unexamined, shadows every moment in time of the present.
