Rabih Alameddine has won the National book award for fiction for The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother), a darkly comic saga spanning six decades in the life of a Lebanese family.
The novel, which traverses a sprawling history of Lebanon including its civil war and economic collapse, is told through the eyes of its titular protagonist: a gay 63-year-old philosophy teacher confronting his past and his relationship with his mother and his homeland.
