A matter of life and death | 20 October 2016

Shades of The Master and Margarita haunt Rabih Alameddine’s sixth book, in which Jacob, a Yemeni-born poet with a day job in IT, battles with drugs, insanity, visions of the Devil and a variety of Christian saints while trying to come to terms with the fallout from the Aids crisis. As that crisis wore on, ignored by the powers-that-be, Jacob’s lover and all of his closest friends died, leaving him with an apartment full of ashes and an eye-watering variety of instructions for their disposal. Yet, while echoes of Bulgakov’s masterpiece inform The Angel of History from first to last (there is even a cat named Behemoth), Alameddine has created a scintillating, original work whose moral complexity and detail of observation are wholly contemporary and entirely his own.

The novel opens with Death and Satan waiting patiently in Jacob’s San Francisco apartment, while the poet tries to check himself into the ‘nuthouse that is St Francis’ for a precious 72 hours’ hiatus from life on the streets.