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NOMINATED FOR THE 2026 DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD
LONGLISTED FOR CANADA READS 2025
CBC BOOKS CANADIAN FICTION BOOKS TO READ IN FALL 2024
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 GILLER PRIZE
FINALIST FOR THE 2024 DAYNE OGILVIE PRIZE FOR LGBTQ2S+ EMERGING WRITERS
FINALIST FOR THE ATWOOD GIBSON WRITERS' TRUST PRIZE
STARRED REVIEWS IN KIRKUS, BOOKLIST AND QUILL & QUIRE
A heartbreaking tale of a family and an impossible love, torn apart by secrets and traditions in late-twentieth-century Cairo.
As a boy in 1960s Cairo, Tarek knows that his entire life is written in advance. He'll be a doctor like his father, marry, and have children. Under the watchful eyes of his mother and his sister, he starts to do just that – until Ali enters his life and turns it upside down. The two men, from very different worlds, embark on an unsayable relationship that threatens to tear apart Tarek's family.
Years later, as Tarek is living a solitary life in Montreal, someone starts writing about him and to him, piecing together a past he wants only to forget. But who is the writer of this tale? And will he figure it out in time?
A bestseller in its original Quebec edition, and the recipient of several awards, including the Prix Femina des Lycéens, What I Know About You is poised to be an international sensation.
"This novel is a searing love story that moves between Egypt and Montréal, that shifts between hearts, highlighting the sacrifices the characters feel they have to make for the ones they love. Romantic, surprising, mesmerizing, and so devastating, What I Know About You examines the terrible costs of family secrets and toxic shame." – Suzette Mayr, author of The Sleeping Car Porter
Nominated for the 2026 Forest of Reading Evergreen Award
One of the Globe & Mail's Best Books of 2024
"Chacour's What I Know About You issues the powerful reminder that even what we cannot see-and what we can barely imagine-can either stop or start a heart beating." – Marcie McCauley, The Temz Review
"A splendid exercise in melancholy and heartbreak with highly empathetic characters, Chacour's first novel is beautifully written and superbly translated from the French by Pablo Strauss. It is not to be missed." – Michael Cart, Booklist ★ STARRED Review
"The slow-burn story of Tarek, a Levantine Christian doctor whose life seems prescribed for him in every matter, even love...Chacour's exceptional restraint in divulging information lets the tension build, carrying the book into the revelation of who is writing Tarek's story. All the author's formal risks result in well-earned rewards." – Kirkus, ★ STARRED Review
"What I Know About You is a cerebral yet emotionally resonant slow burn with an intriguing structure that serves Chacour's plot extremely well. In any language, this is a devastatingly beautiful story." – Dory Cerny, Quill & Quire, ★ STARRED Review
"One man's love for another breaches the norms of gender, society and class in the otherwise modernizing, secular Egypt of Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat. Tarek, a doctor, nurtures a love that comes to him unexpectedly and neither his country, nor his family is able to accept. Elegantly told and profoundly affecting, What I Know About You speaks to the inherited moral structures constraining us, and to the alienation of a man's inner life rendered external. Tarek leaves Cairo and his marriage for Montreal, a cold and foreign city in which his otherness is of a more ordinary kind but, when circumstances finally permit, returns to confront the past and its consequences nebulously in pursuit of him. Here is a quiet, touching story in which the acts of yearning, stymied hearts transcend their troubled genesis and move their hosts towards the possibility of redemption that is love's essence." – 2024 Giller Prize Jury Citation
"What I Know About You announces Chacour as a storyteller of rare ability: deeply emotional in his substan
LONGLISTED FOR CANADA READS 2025
CBC BOOKS CANADIAN FICTION BOOKS TO READ IN FALL 2024
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 GILLER PRIZE
FINALIST FOR THE 2024 DAYNE OGILVIE PRIZE FOR LGBTQ2S+ EMERGING WRITERS
FINALIST FOR THE ATWOOD GIBSON WRITERS' TRUST PRIZE
STARRED REVIEWS IN KIRKUS, BOOKLIST AND QUILL & QUIRE
A heartbreaking tale of a family and an impossible love, torn apart by secrets and traditions in late-twentieth-century Cairo.
As a boy in 1960s Cairo, Tarek knows that his entire life is written in advance. He'll be a doctor like his father, marry, and have children. Under the watchful eyes of his mother and his sister, he starts to do just that – until Ali enters his life and turns it upside down. The two men, from very different worlds, embark on an unsayable relationship that threatens to tear apart Tarek's family.
Years later, as Tarek is living a solitary life in Montreal, someone starts writing about him and to him, piecing together a past he wants only to forget. But who is the writer of this tale? And will he figure it out in time?
A bestseller in its original Quebec edition, and the recipient of several awards, including the Prix Femina des Lycéens, What I Know About You is poised to be an international sensation.
"This novel is a searing love story that moves between Egypt and Montréal, that shifts between hearts, highlighting the sacrifices the characters feel they have to make for the ones they love. Romantic, surprising, mesmerizing, and so devastating, What I Know About You examines the terrible costs of family secrets and toxic shame." – Suzette Mayr, author of The Sleeping Car Porter
Nominated for the 2026 Forest of Reading Evergreen Award
One of the Globe & Mail's Best Books of 2024
"Chacour's What I Know About You issues the powerful reminder that even what we cannot see-and what we can barely imagine-can either stop or start a heart beating." – Marcie McCauley, The Temz Review
"A splendid exercise in melancholy and heartbreak with highly empathetic characters, Chacour's first novel is beautifully written and superbly translated from the French by Pablo Strauss. It is not to be missed." – Michael Cart, Booklist ★ STARRED Review
"The slow-burn story of Tarek, a Levantine Christian doctor whose life seems prescribed for him in every matter, even love...Chacour's exceptional restraint in divulging information lets the tension build, carrying the book into the revelation of who is writing Tarek's story. All the author's formal risks result in well-earned rewards." – Kirkus, ★ STARRED Review
"What I Know About You is a cerebral yet emotionally resonant slow burn with an intriguing structure that serves Chacour's plot extremely well. In any language, this is a devastatingly beautiful story." – Dory Cerny, Quill & Quire, ★ STARRED Review
"One man's love for another breaches the norms of gender, society and class in the otherwise modernizing, secular Egypt of Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat. Tarek, a doctor, nurtures a love that comes to him unexpectedly and neither his country, nor his family is able to accept. Elegantly told and profoundly affecting, What I Know About You speaks to the inherited moral structures constraining us, and to the alienation of a man's inner life rendered external. Tarek leaves Cairo and his marriage for Montreal, a cold and foreign city in which his otherness is of a more ordinary kind but, when circumstances finally permit, returns to confront the past and its consequences nebulously in pursuit of him. Here is a quiet, touching story in which the acts of yearning, stymied hearts transcend their troubled genesis and move their hosts towards the possibility of redemption that is love's essence." – 2024 Giller Prize Jury Citation
"What I Know About You announces Chacour as a storyteller of rare ability: deeply emotional in his substan