Books from Iraq

Can you save someone else when you’re still trying to save yourself? When Nadia Amin, a sharp-witted academic, loses both her lover and her mother’s approval, she escapes to Iraq to lead a UN rehabilitation programme for women affiliated with ISIS. Armed with theories about deradicalisation and an uncertain sense of purpose, Nadia soon discovers that international aid is far messier than academic research suggests. Then she meets Sara, a rebellious young Londoner who joined ISIS at fifteen. Despite their radically different experiences, the two women recognise something of themselves in each other, forming an unlikely friendship that challenges Nadia’s assumptions about guilt, faith, and redemption. When Sara reveals a devastating secret, Nadia must confront the limits of her own idealism. Darkly funny and deeply compassionate, Fundamentally explores radicalisation, cultural identity, and the complicated human need to belong.

In There Are Rivers in the Sky, Elif Shafak weaves together the lives of three characters connected by water, memory, and the ancient city of Nineveh. In Victorian London, Arthur, a gifted boy born into poverty, develops a fascination with the Epic of Gilgamesh. In nineteenth-century Ottoman Mesopotamia, Narin, a young Yazidi girl, faces the threat of displacement as her community’s traditions and homeland come under pressure. In contemporary London, Zaleekhah, a hydrologist struggling with personal loss, becomes drawn into the histories of the Tigris and its surrounding landscapes. Moving across centuries and continents, the novel explores the enduring connections between human lives, ancient civilizations, and the natural world. Through its interwoven narratives, Shafak examines environmental destruction, cultural heritage, religious persecution, and the transformative power of water as a source of life, memory, and renewal.

After spending twenty-one years imprisoned in a remote desert prison, Muzafar-i Subhdam, a Kurdish peshmerga fighter, is finally released. His thoughts turn immediately to his son, Saryas, who was only a few days old when Muzafar was arrested. Determined to find the child he has spent decades imagining, he embarks on a journey through Iraqi Kurdistan, a land scarred by dictatorship, war, and political upheaval. But his search leads to a bewildering discovery: there may be three young men who share his son’s name, their lives intertwined by a history of violence and coincidence. Blending magical realism, dark fable, and historical fiction, Bachtyar Ali creates a dreamlike world in which memory and truth are difficult to separate. Beneath its fantastical narrative lies a devastating examination of how war destroys families and reshapes entire societies. Yet the novel also offers hope, suggesting that compassion, friendship, and love can endure even after extraordinary suffering.

Baghdad, 2002. Under Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, three women find their lives entangled in a dangerous web of secrets, surveillance, and betrayal. Huda, a secretary at the Australian embassy, is ordered by Iraq’s secret police to befriend and spy on Ally Wilson, the wife of a Western diplomat. Refusing could endanger her teenage son, who faces the threat of forced recruitment into a brutal militia. Meanwhile, Rania, Huda’s estranged childhood friend and the daughter of a once-wealthy sheikh, struggles to protect her own daughter as her family’s fortunes collapse. Ally, too, carries secrets connected to her mother’s past in Iraq, and as the women’s lives intersect, they discover that trust can be both dangerous and necessary. Forced to navigate a society where even friendships can become instruments of control, they must decide how much they are willing to risk to protect their children and reclaim their freedom. Inspired by the author’s experiences reporting from Iraq, When the Apricots Bloom is a suspenseful novel about female friendship, motherhood, survival, and the impossible choices people face under an oppressive regime.