Older Brother is the poignant story of a Franco-Syrian family whose father and two sons try to integrate into a society that doesn’t offer them many opportunities. In his debut novel, Guven takes his reader to Paris, introducing two brothers who both dream of a different life. The older drives taxis for Uber, the younger leaves for Syria on idealist grounds, hoping to serve some humanitarian purpose, only to disappear without a trace. Meanwhile, we follow the older brother who roams the streets of Paris with growing anxiety: where is his little brother?
In this sharp and splendidly written novel, Mahir Guven depicts a world whose problems go beyond the extreme such as terrorism: there is the not-belonging and the always-in-between of those growing up with two cultures. Mahir Guven writes in an oral style, mixing slang, Arabic and French, using a language that is both idiosyncratic and very common in Parisian suburbs.
It won Prix Goncourt for the first novel in 2018.