What I Know About You

By: Éric Chacour, Pablo Strauss - translator

Narrated by: Nabil Traboulsi

Length: 5 hrs and 59 mins

Publisher's summary

WINNER OF THE 2023 PRIX PREMIÈRE PLUME

WINNER OF THE 2024 PRIX DES CINQ CONTINENTS

A heartbreaking tale of a family and an impossible love, torn apart by secrets and traditions in late-twentieth-century Cairo.

In a tight-knit Levantine Christian family in 1960s Cairo, Tarek’s entire life is written in advance. He’ll be a doctor like his father, marry, and have children. Under the watchful eye of the family’s strong women, he starts to do just that–until a patient’s son, Ali, enters his life and turns it upside down. The two men’s unsayable relationship sparks a series of events as dramatic as the Six-Day War and assassination of President Anwar Sadat playing out in the background.

The turn of the millennium finds Tarek living as a doctor in Montreal. Someone is writing about him and to him, piecing together a past he wants only to forget. But who is the writer of this tale? And will Tarek figure it out in time?

From Cairo’s grand boulevards and hidden alleys to Montreal’s grim winter, from the reign of Nasser to the early 2000s, What I Know About You tells the heartbreaking story of a family torn apart by an epic love.

“This novel is a searing love story that moves between Egypt and Montréal, that shifts between hearts, highlighting the sacrifices the characters feel they have to make for the ones they love. Romantic, surprising, mesmerizing, and so devastating, What I Know About You examines the terrible costs of family secrets and toxic shame.”–Suzette Mayr, author of The Sleeping Car Porter

A bestseller in its original Quebec edition, and the recipient of several awards, including the Prix Femina, What I Know About You is poised to be an international sensation.

©2024 Éric Chacour (P)2024 Coach House Books

Critic reviews

“A splendid exercise in melancholy and heartbreak with highly empathetic characters, Chacour’s first novel is beautifully written and superbly translated from the French by Pablo Strauss. It is not to be missed.”—Michael Cart, Booklist ★ STARRED Review

“Astute prose that reveals as much through words as it does through silences ... What I Know About You is a heartrending novel in which unanswered questions and unvoiced feelings take on a life of their own.”—Eileen Gonzalez, Foreword Reviews

“A writer who charts his own course, polishing each sentence until it conveys the totality of the observable world, from the smallest gesture and look to the displacements contained in our life choices. A story of love, memory, and devastation.”—Jury statement, Prix des cinq continents (winner)