The Fourth Wall

Beirut, 1982, at the outbreak of the second Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and the young French activist George has been tasked by his old friend Samuel – a Greek Jewish resistance fighter and theatre director – with staging a performance of Jean Anouilh's Antigone in the Lebanese city. 

   With a cast composed of those on all sides – Palestinian, Christian, Druze, Jewish, Shiite, Sunni, Chaldean and Armenian – and a stage caught amid the chaos and destruction of the approaching war, George and Sam hope that this radical act of art may spark the beginnings of peace and reconciliation. Their aspirations, however, are soon confronted by the brutal realities of the conflict and the true price of violence.  

   Profound, harrowing and as urgently relevant as ever, The Fourth Wall is a stunning literary novel, informed by the author's own experiences as a journalist in the Middle East.



Sorj Chalandon was a reporter for Libération from 1974 to 2008, during which time he was awarded the Albert Londres prize for his writing on the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and his reporting on the trial of Nazi criminal Klaus Barbie. He went on to work for Le Canard Enchaîné. He is the author of a dozen novels, all originally published in French by Éditions Grasset. His numerous literary awards include Le Grand Prix du Roman de l'Académie Française, le Prix Médicis, and le Prix du Style. His 2013 novel Le Quatriéme Mur won the prestigious Prix Goncourt des Lycéens, and the Goncourt de l'Orient, among other accolades, and has been adapted for stage and screen, and translated into 10 languages. The novel was translated into English by Cheney Crow in 2026 as The Fourth Wall.



'A magnificent story. The Fourth Wall carries us to Lebanon at its most divided, most united; its most brutal, most gentle; its most complex, most simple. Not a breath of the characters' lives is wasted, hardly a single step is without consequence. George, the protagonist, says, "they came for a taste of drama, to be part of it, to see up close someone who had seen." We open the book in that expectation. We see and we understand.'