The Broken Cedar [Paperback]

Written by a former military policeman, and dealing with the effects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on Lebanese life, The Broken Cedar is nothing if not timely. Khalil, owner of a small electrical shop on the Israeli-Lebanon border for years, has managed to survive through tumultuous times. Now, with only a short time to live, it is time to face his life's reckoning. An unwilling accomplice to the lynching of two UN peacekeepers years before, he finds shadows of such old events rising up again with the sudden appearance of a victim's son. As he attempts to reconcile past actions with present consequences, Khalil's personal crisis of conscience can be also taken as a national one. The result is a novel with wider ramifications than just the personal drama it describes.

Martin Malone's earlier novels, After Kafra and Us, drew on his considerable experience of the conflict in the Middle East, and he returns to this familiar setting for his third work. Set amidst the turmoil of the Israel/Lebanon border, this powerful novel examines one man's personal crisis of conscience, and his need finally to come to terms with his actions many years previously. Khalil owns a small electrical shop in the Enclave, a buffer zone between Israel and Lebanon. He has done well for himself, supplying the needs of the UN soldiers as well as his own people, keeping his head down and earning enough money to build a beautiful house for himself and his wife, Zarifa. He employs a neighbour's little boy to help him in the shop, as a gesture of kindness towards the boy's mother who suffers at the hands of her abusive husband. Khalil is determined to ensure that Daoud receives an education and that his mother, Dahab, escapes from her husband to start a new life for herself and her son in another country. Yet beneath this philanthropic exterior, Khalil nurses a dreadful secret. As his life draws to a close and he increasingly feels the need to put his house in order, the burden of the past becomes almost unbearable. The arrival of young Jimmy O'Driscoll in search of his father's remains brings matters to a head. Khalil must confront the events of that terrible night many years ago, when he watched as two young men were attacked by a lynch mob. The victims were two UN peacekeepers, one of them O'Driscoll's father. As the novel unfolds we learn that Khalil, far from abetting the murder of both men, actually helped save O'Driscoll's life, spiriting him away to a home for the insane under the care of his brother-in-law. When Jimmy O'Driscoll returns to search for his father, Khalil is put in a dreadful position. Should he let the distraught young Irishman carry on believing that his father is dead, or should he break the vow of silence he made to the traumatised O'Driscoll years before? Malone's powerful, disturbing novel not only examines issues of guilt and divided loyalties, but also looks at personal conflicts within families, touching upon issues such as the controlling influence of men in Middle Eastern marriages, and the inferior position of women in many relationships. Although over 60, Khalil is a modern thinker - he regards his wife as an equal and has no truck with abusive, adulterous husbands, and his relationship with Zafira is still passionate, in spite of his illness. This is a profoundly moving novel, complex and full of fascinating insights into an area of the Middle Eastern conflict seldom addressed by other writers. (Kirkus UK) --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

‘His prose has qualities that would be welcome in more new Irish novelists: restraint; steadfastness; comprehensive adult empathy’ --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.