Canadian Books ~ A Simple Carpenter

Set in the early and mid-‘80s in the Middle East, A Simple Carpenter plays out against a backdrop of strife in Lebanon and ethnic/religious tensions between Jews and Arabs in Israel and Palestine. This historical backdrop serves as an empathetic and thoughtful commentary on our modern political climate.

Part biblical fable, part magic realism, and part thriller, A Simple Carpenter follows the epic journey of a ship’s carpenter stranded on a small Mediterranean island and visited by a frightening mysterious creature. He’s lost his memory but has acquired the ability to speak, write and understand all languages. After his rescue, he spends time in a Lebanese coastal village recuperating with a group of nuns who, observing him perform what appear to be small miracles, take him to be the second coming of Jesus Christ. Later in Beirut he’s hired as a translator for the UN peacekeeping force, and is recruited as a messenger for a group named Black September. On a quest to find his true identity he travels on foot across the hills to the Sea of Galilee, encountering a series of strange and magical communities evoking biblical times along the way.

“Dave Margoshes’s A Simple Carpenter is many things: a meditation on memory and identity, on religious faith and doubt, on the yearning for a messiah, and on the perennially tangled, fraught state of Arab-Israeli relations. Out of all these elements he has constructed a tale that is part mystery and part fable, that blends present day realities with myth and magic. This is a novel as beguiling as it is ambitious.” — Guy Vanderhaeghe, author of August Into Winter

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