Adrift

Lead non-fiction title for Fall 2020 Amin Maalouf was a journalist in Lebanon until the civil war in 1975, when he left for Paris with his family. He became a novelist whose historical characters span cultures and continents. His work has been translated into 40 languages. Maalouf is the author of several bestselling titles in the US, and is best-known for his work of non-fiction including The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, which sold 26,870 copies here. The NYT writes about Maalouf: "Maalouf is a writer of historical fiction (his novel "The Rock of Tanios" won the 1993 Prix Goncourt), a sometime opera librettist and a quirky historian in "The Crusades Through Arab Eyes," he brilliantly reconstituted a semi-documentary narrative from "the other side." He is one of that small handful of writers, like David Grossman and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who are indispensable to us in our current crisis." World-renowned writer Amin Maalouf is awake to the dangers of "the secret call of events that are about to happen", according to the words of the poet Constantin Cavafy and many of his previous predictions have come true. Adrift is a warning signal, a call for an awakening. Maalouf believes that our planet is drifting towards major crises that could harm all societies. He says: "We can still avoid the worst, but the time we have to do so is not unlimited. Everyone needs to be aware of the existing risks. This is the book's ambition. My role as a writer is to try to understand and to explain the workings of the world." In Adrift, Maalouf writes of a global "sinking" that is affecting all of civilization. The text, broad and dense at the same time, crosses through the 20th century to the present day, mixing narrations and reflections, sometimes recounting major events to which the author found himself in the rare position of being an eyewitness. There are elements of a memoir, but the author only writes about himself as a gateway to talk about the world around him.

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