This original contribution by Sinan Antoon was published on March 19th, 2018, in The New York Times.
When I was 12, Saddam Hussein, vice president of Iraq at the time, carried out a huge purge and officially usurped total power. I was living in Baghdad then, and I developed an intuitive, visceral hatred of the dictator early on. That feeling only intensified and matured as I did. In the late 1990s, I wrote my first novel, “I’jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody,” about daily life under Saddam’s authoritarian regime. Furat, the narrator, was a young college …
Published by Kirkus Reviews, September 13th, 2017
A cross-section of life in one Tripoli neighborhood, from a wealthy resident to a housecleaner to a terrorist. This brisk and affecting novel by veteran Lebanese writer Douaihy (June Rain, 2015, etc.) is set during the early stages of the Iraq War and follows three archetypal characters.