Rabih Alameddine won the 2025 US National Book Award for fiction for his buoyant and camp seventh novel The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother). Told by a 63-year-old gay philosophy teacher and drag entertainer living in Beirut, it is set against the backdrop of the modern history of Lebanon from the civil war to the port explosion in 2020. It is a queer coming-of-age tale, an exploration of the bond between a mother and a son, and a meditation on storytelling, memory, survival and what it means to be truly free.

‘Poignant but never cynical, often dark but never dour, wise without being showy and always eager to crack a joke, this is a novel that insists that the pain of the past need overwhelm neither present nor narrative, identity nor personality. With Sartre as his guide, and a drag fabulousness all his own, Raja shows us how.’ (The Guardian).