Winner, 2011 Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction
Longlisted for the 2013 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
Longlisted for CBC Canada Reads 2016

Swiftly paced, poignantly moving, and beautifully imagined, Niko is the powerful epic story of what it takes to survive after war, of what to hold dear and what to leave behind in a world that won’t let you have it all.

Six-year-old Niko Karam has never known a life outside civil war. He rarely leaves his parents’ small apartment, and from its small balcony he listens to the world outside tumble down one building at a time. But after a car bomb kills his pregnant mother, Niko is thrust into a much wider and confusing world without apartments or balconies, as he and his father Antoine embark on an impossible twelve-year odyssey that leads them across seven countries, including Canada, in search of a new place to call home.

“Sobering but never maudlin, instructive without feeling pedantic, Niko cuts like a scythe through the grand myths of Canadian multiculturalism. In clear-eyed prose reminiscent of Ha Jin and JM Coetzee, Dimitri Nasrallah has written an honest, affecting novel about the ache and longing of exile.” -Pasha Malla, author of The Withdrawal Method and People Park

Dimitri Nasrallah was born in 1977, during the Lebanese civil war. In 1981,
his family went into exile, living in Athens, Kuwait, and Dubai before
immigrating to Canada in 1988. He received a Bachelor's degree from York
University in 2001, and then a Master's degree from Concordia University in
2003. He currently lives in Montreal. Apart from his creative work, he is a cultural critic whose writing has appeared
in national and international publications, including the Montreal Gazette,
Montreal Review of Books, Exclaim!, Toronto's Eye Weekly, Urb, and several
others.Blackbodying is his first novel.

Dimitri Nasrallah's profile page