The Only Café

Scotiabank Giller prize-winner Linden MacIntyre is back with a timely and gripping novel in which a son tries to solve the mystery of his father's death—a man who tried but could not forget a troubled past in his native Lebanon.
Pierre Cormier had secrets. Though he married twice, became a high-flying lawyer and a father, he didn't let anyone really know him. And he was especially silent about what had happened to him in Lebanon, the country he fled during civil war to come to Canada as a refugee. When, in the midst of a corporate scandal, he went missing after his boat exploded, his teenaged son Cyril didn't know how to mourn him. But five years later, a single bone and a distinctive gold chain are recovered, and Pierre is at last declared dead. Which changes everything.
At the reading of the will, it turns out that instead of a funeral, Pierre wanted a "roast" at a bar no one knew he frequented—The Only Café in Toronto's east end. He'd even left...