False War

The characters in False War are ambivalent castaways living lives of deep estrangement from their home country, stranded in an existential no-man’s land. Some of them want to leave and can’t, others left and never quite finished getting anywhere. In this choral novel, employing a dazzling range of narrative styles from noir to autofiction, Carlos Manuel Álvarez brings together a series of interconnected stories of the perennially displaced. From Havana to Mexico City to Miami, from New York to Paris to Berlin, whether toiling in a barber shop, lost in the Louvre, competing in a chess hall in Cuba, plotting a theft, or on a trip for émigré dissidents, these characters learn that while they may appear to be on the move, in reality they are paralysed, living in permanent stasis. With a fractured narrative that brilliantly reflects the disintegration that comes with uprooting, full of tenderness, disenchantment and melancholy, False War is an extraordinary novel that confirms Carlos Manuel Álvarez as one of the indispensable voices of his generation. 

‘I was blown away by this novel. Nothing in the story is reducible. Its formal ambition is met by its execution, and the effect is staggering. Álvarez is an immense writer, a generational talent, and this, for me, is a generation-defining work.’
— Michael Magee, author of Close to Home

‘What happens when exile becomes style, and style becomes a kind of home? False War is that question asked with tenderness, fury and precision.’
— Carlos Fonseca, author of Austral

‘The dissidents, migrants and exiles of False War travel the world in search of some kind of refuge, but the cities they arrive in are places of purgatory, allegorical waystations of the permanently displaced, where everyone is an outsider, caught between landfalls, hurrying nowhere: “Brightness inside, darkness outside – until we crash.” This is a timeless and urgent work, in turns lyrical, hardboiled, tender, fragmented. It maps a way forward for the twenty-first century novel.’
— Jeet Thayil, author of Names of the Women

Paperback.