Bani has finished uni and is working at his father’s army disposal store, boxing in his spare time in Lakemba, Sydney. But quickly we’re dropped back among the world of the Lebs and their tribal dramas. He waxes lyrical about his son’s birth: “You come tearing through your mother and into this universe like zamzam water, which sprung from the desert of your ancestors”. Sometime in the future Bani is writing to his son Kahlil, named after Bani’s grandfather who left Lebanon for Australia in the 1960s and the poet Gibran Kahlil Gibran whose words form the epigraph for the novel and appear throughout. The Other Half Of You, the third in Michael Mohammad Ahmad’s auto-fictional trilogy, picks up where The Lebs leaves off, although is recounted in a rather different manner. As a story it barely hangs together, but as a torrent of writing I can think of few reading experiences as thrilling. The Lebs is one of my favourite Australian novels of recent years, the hilarious, offensive and savage tale of Bani Adam, a teenage Lebanese Australian finding his feet in a country that espouses multiculturalism but fails to live it at pretty much every turn.
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