And then he discovers later his whole family is gone,' says MacIntyre. 'I'm channelling a lot of that stuff through Pierre, who was a man with an obvious conscience who found himself into it by virtue of almost happenstance, where he and his dad are walking home one evening and dad gets murdered, and Pierre almost gets murdered. The pair share a common history having both lost family in the 1976 massacre in the Lebanese town of Damour. In flashbacks, readers explore the fictional Pierre's connections to real-life figures like Elie Hobeika, the former Lebanese Christian warlord whose Israeli-backed gunmen were implicated in the 1982 massacre. The novel centres on Pierre Cormier, a Lebanese man who arrives in Canada as a refugee but can't escape his mysterious and violent past. The Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning author channelled the horrors of war and its haunting aftermath into a fictional work 'The Only Cafe' (Random House Canada).

That's the kind of stuff that stays with me.' 'This horrifying day is being witnessed by little guys that will become bigger guys, and they will all have been changed and transfigured by this. It was a mature form of rage in their faces, and it just struck me that this moment is forever,' says MacIntyre.

They had this old look you don't often see on young people. 'The looks on their faces were indescribable. 'It fell out of the front end of a machine that was digging the bodies of a family out of a house where they'd all been murdered,' MacIntyre recalls.Ī group of preteen boys observed MacIntyre's reaction to the grim scene, which was deeply affecting for the award-winning broadcaster, who spent 24 years as co-host of the CBC newsmagazine show 'The Fifth Estate.' He vividly remembers seeing a child's forearm perfectly intact - with no body attached to it.

MacIntyre was on the ground after the 1982 massacre of Palestinian refugees at the Sabra and Shatila camps by Israeli-backed Christian militiamen.

It has been more than three decades since Linden MacIntyre reported on the atrocities of the Lebanese Civil War, but the veteran journalist says one haunting image has remained with him.

The Only Café by Linden MacIntyre