Books from Iraq

An Iraqi in Paris is a semi-autobiographical novel by Samuel Shimon about a young Iraqi writer who leaves his homeland with the ambition of becoming a Hollywood filmmaker. His plans do not unfold as expected. Instead of reaching the film industry, he ends up living as a refugee in Paris, sleeping in a metro station. At the center of his aspirations is a film he wants to make about his deaf mute father, a project that remains unrealized throughout the story.

Along the way, the narrator crosses paths with figures such as Jean-Luc Godard and Samuel Beckett, and encounters a ghost from Pere Lachaise Cemetery. These episodes mix hardship with unexpected humor and a persistent sense of nostalgia. The novel moves between cultures and cities, tracing displacement and the slow reshaping of identity that comes with exile. Shimon draws on his own experience as an Iraqi abroad, and the book sits between memoir and fiction without fully committing to either.

The setting shifts from Iraq to the streets and underground stations of Paris, grounding the story in specific, physical places rather than abstract ideas about belonging. Cultural alienation and stubborn hope run through the narrative side by side.

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Baghdad Noir gathers fourteen new stories about the Iraqi capital, edited by the writer Samuel Shimon. Contributors include Sinan Antoon, Ali Bader, Mohammed Alwan Jabr, Nassif Falak, Ahmed Saadawi, Muhsin al-Ramli, Hadia Said, Salima Salih, and Roy Scranton. Noir, a form built around crime, moral compromise, and bleak city atmospheres, gives each writer a shared frame for one very specific place.

Most stories take place after the American invasion of April 2003. One is set in 1950, and three belong to the 1970s and 1980s, so the collection moves across several decades of Iraqi life. Shimon's introduction links those earlier years to the present, treating recent history as the ground on which today's Baghdad stands. The city itself remains the constant across every period.

In that introduction Shimon also writes about Saddam Hussein's rule, the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, and the damage those years did to ordinary life in Iraq. He states that the 2003 invasion brought an end to the dictatorship while also closing off the possibility of a secular, modern Iraq. The stories work inside conditions that the genre, by Shimon's account, can only approximate.

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In U.S.-occupied Baghdad, a scavenger named Hadi collects human body parts from the city's bomb-scarred streets and stitches them together into a single corpse. His stated reason is practical rather than sinister: he wants the government to acknowledge these remains as people and arrange a proper burial. The corpse, assembled from fragments of different victims, is his way of forcing recognition of the dead who might otherwise go uncounted.

When the body disappears from Hadi's home, a string of violent and unexplained killings begins across the city. Witnesses describe a grotesque figure who survives being shot. Hadi comes to understand that his creation has taken on a life of its own and requires human flesh to sustain itself. The creature initially targets those it considers guilty, but that distinction does not hold for long.

Ahmed Saadawi sets the novel against the daily chaos of Baghdad during the occupation, where explosions, checkpoints, and rumor shape ordinary life. The book recasts the classic Frankenstein premise within a city where bodies are already being torn apart by war, blurring the line between the monster's violence and the violence that surrounds it. Dark humor and horror run side by side throughout.

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God in Pink is Hasan Namir's debut novel, set in Iraq in 2003 during a period of war and upheaval. The story follows Ramy, a closeted university student living under the watchful eye of his older brother and sister-in-law after the death of his parents. Pressured to find a wife and conform to family expectations, Ramy struggles privately with questions about his identity as a gay man within a society shaped by faith and tradition.

Seeking some form of guidance, Ramy turns to Ammar, a sheikh at a nearby mosque. Ammar's role as a religious counselor places him at the center of a conflict he did not anticipate: Ramy's situation pushes against the boundaries of what Ammar believes the Qur'an teaches, forcing the sheikh to reconsider his own convictions. The novel moves between their perspectives, giving weight to both the personal and the theological dimensions of the tension between them.

The book is set against the daily realities of life in Iraq during the early stages of the 2003 conflict, where ordinary decisions about love, family, and belonging carry particular urgency. Namir grounds the story in specific domestic and social pressures rather than broad generalizations about culture or religion.

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Iraq + 100 is an anthology of speculative fiction edited by Hassan Blasim. It gathers stories by Iraqi writers, some still living in Iraq and others scattered across the global diaspora, and asks each of them to imagine what the country might look like in the year 2103. That date is deliberate: it falls exactly one century after the 2003 invasion that reshaped Iraqi society, infrastructure, and daily life.

The contributors work across science fiction, allegory, and magical realism, building futures for cities and landscapes that have already been transformed by conflict. Some stories picture technological change; others explore shifts in memory, language, or social order. Running through many of them are concerns about family, displacement, and what survives when a culture is forced to rebuild from loss. The collection does not treat Iraq as a single idea but as a place with varied communities and competing visions of what comes next.

Blasim, an Iraqi-born writer and filmmaker who has lived in Finland, shaped the anthology around voices that rarely appear in English-language speculative fiction. The result is a set of futures rooted in specific geography and recent history rather than in generic dystopian conventions.

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Baghdad, 1991. As the Gulf War begins, a young Iraqi girl takes shelter from air raids with her neighbors. In the crowded refuge she meets Nadia, and the two form a close friendship built on shared stories, whispered hopes, and the act of imagining a life beyond the conflict surrounding them. Shahad Al Rawi's debut novel follows these two girls as they grow up in a city under bombardment, where the ordinary details of childhood exist alongside sirens and uncertainty.

As the years pass, international sanctions reshape daily life in Baghdad. Friends and neighbors leave the country one by one, and the familiar city the girls know begins to change around them. The novel traces how war and isolation affect not only buildings and infrastructure but also relationships, routines, and the small freedoms that children take for granted. First loves, family bonds, and neighborhood life all unfold against a backdrop of gradual loss.

Al Rawi wrote the novel originally in Arabic. It was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2018 and became a bestselling title in Iraq, Dubai, and the UAE. The story is set across a period when Baghdad's population experienced successive waves of conflict and economic pressure, and the narrative stays close to the perspective of its young characters throughout.

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Beginning in 2014, Daesh launched a campaign of persecution against the Yazidi people in northern Iraq. Thousands were killed, and young women and girls were captured and enslaved. Dunya Mikhail, an Iraqi-born poet and journalist, conducted extensive interviews with several women who survived captivity. Their accounts describe forced displacement, sexual violence, psychological abuse, and coerced labor, including work related to chemical weapons production.

At the center of the book is a figure known as the beekeeper, a man whose familiarity with the geography of the region allowed him to organize escape routes across Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. He coordinated with a loose network of drivers, local contacts, and former smugglers to move women out of Daesh-held territory one at a time. The routes were dangerous and improvised, relying on trust between people who often had little else in common.

Mikhail structures the book around these individual stories of captivity and flight, letting each woman's experience stand on its own terms. The beekeeper's role emerges gradually through the accounts rather than through a single continuous narrative. The result is a work of nonfiction shaped by firsthand testimony and grounded in specific places across a fractured landscape.

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Sinan Antoon's fourth novel centers on Nameer, a young Iraqi doctoral student at Harvard who is recruited by a film crew to help document the destruction left by the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The assignment takes him back to Baghdad, where he walks the streets of a city shaped by occupation and loss. On al-Mutanabbi Street, long known as the heart of Baghdad's book trade, Nameer meets Wadood, a bookseller engaged in an unusual and consuming project.

Wadood is attempting to compile an inventory of everything the war has destroyed. His catalogue spans objects, buildings, books, manuscripts, plant and animal life, and human beings. The scale of the task is enormous and perhaps impossible, but Wadood pursues it with stubborn dedication. Through the encounter between these two figures, the novel examines how war erases not only people and places but also the records and artifacts that hold a culture's memory. Nameer, living between the United States and Iraq, carries the tension of distance from a homeland undergoing irreversible change.

The story is set partly in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and partly in Baghdad. Antoon, himself an Iraqi-born writer and scholar, draws on that geographic split to frame questions about documentation, responsibility, and what can be preserved when destruction operates on such a broad scale.

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Hassan Blasim's short story collection presents the Iraq War through the eyes of an Iraqi writer. The stories move between documented reality and surreal invention, placing soldiers, refugees, and car bombers alongside prophets, djinni, and sorcerers. Blasim does not separate these registers neatly. A story may begin in a recognizable Baghdad street and shift without warning into hallucination or myth, leaving the reader uncertain where observed fact ends and dark fantasy begins.

Violence in these pages is frequent and direct, but Blasim treats it with a dry, bitter humor rather than spectacle. The title story follows an instructor who teaches the art of displaying corpses for maximum public shock, a premise that sits uncomfortably close to the images that emerged from Abu Ghraib and from everyday bombings reported during the occupation years. Other stories follow asylum seekers, smugglers, and people caught between militia factions, each narrative compressed and unsettling.

Blasim was born in Baghdad in 1973 and later settled in Finland. The Guardian described him as perhaps the best Arabic fiction writer alive. The collection was originally written in Arabic and translated into English by Jonathan Wright.

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The Iraqi Cookbook gathers recipes that Lamees Ibrahim traces to the household cooking of Iraq, where dishes have been handed down through generations and reshaped over time. It was published as the first Iraqi cookbook to appear in North America, and it sets its recipes beside commissioned photographs and short notes on the history and culture surrounding the food.

Iraqi cooking belongs to the land between the Tigris and Euphrates, the region long called Mesopotamia, where grain farming, date palms, and long-distance trade in spices shaped daily meals. Ibrahim's collection carries influences absorbed across different eras of Iraqi history, and she places brief storytelling and cultural notes next to the cooking so each dish sits within the life of a family table.

The recipes are written in detailed steps for cooks who may be meeting Iraqi food for the first time. Ibrahim names ingredients that are available to readers in Western shops, suggests alternatives when something is difficult to source, and adds practical tips along the way. The book also acknowledges that Iraq's cultural life has often been overshadowed by decades of conflict and war.

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The Tobacco Keeper follows a journalist in Iraq who sets out to piece together the life of a recently deceased musician. The musician was Iraqi and Jewish, and over decades he assumed different identities as the country's political landscape shifted around him. The journalist's research becomes a layered reconstruction, drawing on interviews, documents, and conflicting accounts that do not always align. Each version of the musician's story reveals something different about the society he moved through.

Ali Bader, an Iraqi novelist, uses this fragmented structure to examine how personal identity can dissolve and reform under pressure from war, ideology, and displacement. The novel reaches back into a period when Iraqi cities held diverse communities of Arabs, Kurds, Jews, Christians, and others whose daily lives overlapped in ways that later generations may find hard to imagine. Baghdad's once-cosmopolitan character is central to the book's concerns.

The narrative raises questions about memory and reliability. As the journalist gathers testimony, the musician's biography keeps changing shape, and the distance between fact and invention grows harder to measure. Art, politics, and exile run through the story as recurring forces that reshape both individuals and the historical record they leave behind.

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In the winter of 1915, the Ottoman Empire still controls Iraq, and the First World War has reached the banks of the Tigris. Ahmad, a young Iraqi man seeking independence from Ottoman rule, leaves his family to join the British-backed revolt. Far away in Wales, a teenager named Carwyn enlists reluctantly and is shipped through Gallipoli and Egypt before arriving in Mesopotamia. Ruqaya Izzidien's novel follows these two lives as they move toward the same conflict from opposite directions.

When Ahmad and Carwyn eventually cross paths, the story draws their fates together. Both face the violence of the campaign, but the novel also traces the forms of discrimination and betrayal each encounters along the way. Ahmad contends with the political reality of exchanging one occupying power for another, while Carwyn deals with the pressures that drove him into a war he did not choose. The parallel structure allows the book to observe how promises of liberation and duty look different depending on where a person stands.

The setting spans several locations across the Middle East and beyond, from the Tigris river valley to Gallipoli and Egypt. Izzidien uses this geography to frame a part of the First World War that receives less attention in English-language fiction than the Western Front.

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