The Only Cafe, Linden MacIntyre
The Only Cafe, Linden MacIntyre
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The Only Café

Author: Linden MacIntyre

Narrator: Greg Campbell

Unabridged: 10 hr 33 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/08/2017

Synopsis

The Only Café is both a moving mystery in which a son tries to solve the mystery of his father's death and an illuminating exploration of how the traumatic past, if left unexamined, shadows every moment of the present.

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.

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. 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.

About The Author

LINDEN MacINTYRE's bestselling first novel, The Long Stretch, was nominated for a CBA LIbris Award and his boyhood memoir, Causeway: A Passage from Innocence, won both the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Nonfiction and the Evelyn Richardson Prize. His second novel, The Bishop's Man, was a #1 national bestseller, won the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Dartmouth Book Award and the CBA Libris Fiction Book of the Year Award, among other honours. The third book in the loose-knit trilogy, Why Men Lie, was also a #1 national bestseller as well as a Globe and Mail "Can't Miss" Book for 2012. MacIntyre, who spent 24 years as the co-host ofthe fifth estate, is a distinguished broadcast journalist who has won ten Gemini awards for his workThe narrator for this audio book is SoulPepper actor, writer and director Greg Campbell.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Wendy

This is my 3rd novel by Linden MacIntyre and I did enjoy them all. The Only Cafe would have to be my least favourite of the three. I love his writing and enjoyed the setting being familiar streets and neighbourhoods to me. However, I found it difficult to determine between the good and the bad guys.......more

Goodreads review by Krista

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. A......more

Goodreads review by Cybercrone

Didn't enjoy this much. It was overladen with so much historical and Middle Eastern political detail I could never keep track of who was who, or who was doing what to who. Or what it meant. And then there was an unresolved ending, and I'm not a fan of those. So basically I found it a slog to an ending......more

Goodreads review by Amal

"Whether or not 'tis in the mind nobler to disclose. But disclosure is rarely noble. Disclosure is transactional. Disclosure is a ruse to create trust.... The best interrogators were the ones who were capable of manufactured empathy". These lines occur half way down a page in a paragraph that is par......more

Quotes

“The Only Café will transfix you with its disquieting and cautionary narrative. . . . Judicious and expertly timed. . . . The Only Café’s elegant prose attains a lyrical quality. . . . [A] testament to MacIntyre’s dexterity as a storyteller.”
—The Globe and Mail

“Spare, propulsive and rich in observational detail and dialogue. . . . MacIntyre’s journalism training and experience . . . allow him to explore Lebanon’s labyrinthine, multi-factional civil war with authority and compassion.”
—James Grainger, author of Harmless, Toronto Star

“The Only Café is imbued with a feeling of lived authenticity.”
—Quill and Quire

“Unlike the cozy armchair mysteries of Agatha Christie—where everything is wrapped up in a neat little bow by story’s end—The Only Café argues that not all mysteries will be solved and perhaps that’s for the best. MacIntyre’s characters insist that truth is a fiction or at best an amorphous reality and that ‘the only way to know what happens is to be part of it.’”
—Atlantic Books

“Linden MacIntyre has mined his other life, as a venerable CBC journalist, to pen The Only Café, and the novel works wonderfully. . . . [A] twisty, literate thriller that ranks among the most enjoyable novels I’ve read this year. International intrigue, masterful storytelling and a sure hand make The Only Café a compelling read.”
—49th Shelf

“[A] taut, powerful novel.”
—The Chronicle Herald

“[MacIntyre’s] trademark narrative skill makes the novel a must-read. . . . As he traces Cyril’s progress, MacIntyre uses his intriguing tale to underscore the futility of trying to erase the past. One of MacIntyre’s strengths is his remarkable command of dialogue. Conversations between characters are snappy, convincing and laced with wit. Another strength is the writer’s ability to observe, with a keen eye, the details of everyday life, both in Toronto and in the Middle East.”
—St. Thomas Times-Journal

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