Five years after Pierre’s presumed death, his son, Cyril, an unpaid CBC newsroom intern, tries to reassemble the events of his father’s life, including the older man’s possible involvement in the aforementioned Lebanese massacre.” (taken from Q&Q review) At the time of the accident, Pierre was working as a high-priced lawyer for an exploitative Canadian mining company. “ Flipping back and forth through time, the novel tells the story of Pierre Cormier, a Lebanese refugee with a secret past who disappeared during a mysterious boat explosion in Cape Breton. The Only Cafe is: “ about an enigmatic man haunted by a troubled past in his native Lebanon and the Canadian-born son who tries to solve the mystery of his father’s life.” (taken from publisher’s synopsis.) This Quill and Quire review sums up some of my thoughts and feelings about this novel, and gives a good sense of how this should have been a more excellent read by MacIntyre, given his own personal journalistic experiences covering one of the many atrocious war-torn moments in Lebanon’s history.

Whereas I normally have a hard time peeling my eyes away from MacIntyre’s stories, this one I was struggling to pick up. Unlike Punishment, to use one example of my love for MacIntyre’s novels, one where I raced through the pages and was left begging for more and never wanting it to end, The Only Cafe left me feeling like I was on a hamster wheel, going around and around the wheel reading about the same thing over and over again, never really moving forward. (Sadly, this seems to be happening to me too many times this year – my counted-on-go-to-authors for a sure-fire read have been letting me down this year! First John Boyne’s The Heart’s Invisible Furies, and now MacIntyre’s The Only Cafe.) What can I say? This just wasn’t my favourite MacIntyre.

The only café linden macintyre