Description
Book SynopsisSELECTED BY THE FINANCIAL TIMES AND DAUNTS BOOKS AS A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023
ONE OF PROSPECT'S POLITICS & REPORTAGE BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2023
SHORTLISTED FOR EDWARD STANFORD TRAVEL BOOK OF THE YEAR
'Exquisite . . . A genuine, melancholy masterpiece' WILLIAM DALRYMPLE
'A journalistic marvel' JAMES MEEK
'A powerful, unforgettable book' NADIFA MOHAMMED
From Orwell Prize winning journalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad comes a searing and nuanced biography of a lost Iraq
This is the story of a people who once lived under the rule of a megalomaniac leader who shaped the state in his own image. Then one day, after yet another war, a foreign army invaded, toppled the leader, destroyed the state, and proceeded to invent a new country. This is the story of a people who watched with horror as their world fragmented into a hundred different cities, as walls rose between them and bodies piled in the streets.
From the American invasion to the Arab Spring, ISIS and beyond, A Stranger in Your Own City offers a remarkable de-centring of the West in the history and contemporary situation of the region. What comes to the fore is the effect on the ground: the human cost, the shifting allegiances, the generational change.
'Shatters western assumptions . . . and offers cautious hope' The Observer
'Haunting' Financial Times
Trade ReviewAn excellent and haunting account of the impact of western policies premised on sectarianism that engulfed the country after 2003 -- Charles Clover * Financial Times *
A bracing read, punctuated by accounts of violence, torture and extortion * The Guardian *
This book
shatters western assumptions, shows the effect on Iraqis of cycles of violence - and offers cautious hope . . .
A Stranger in Your Own City reminds us is that sectarianism was imposed on many Iraqis post-invasion by new rulers who . . . needed a political system based on sectarianism. This isn't just a book about war. The epilogue shows it's also about the generation who saw the folly in the invasion's design and rose up. At some point, change is inevitable. -- Renad Mansour * The Observer *
A Stranger in Your Own City is
a stunning piece of emotional and psychological topography, charting the many clashing lives of pre- and post-invasion Iraq. Unlike a parade of books that focused predominantly on the Westerners who helped unleash so much of the country's carnage, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad centers the people who call Iraq home. Through visceral, sometimes first-hand accounts, he tells the stories of both victims and perpetrators, never retreating into artificial neutrality.
This is a vital archive of a time and place in history that, in the post-9/11 age, so many would rather forget,
a book that's at once difficult to read and impossible to put down -- Omar El Akkad, author of WHAT STRANGE PARADISE
A crucial and important new voice, as brilliant, passionate and fearless as he is well-informed, skeptical and nuanced. But Ghaith Abdul-Ahad is also a writer of exquisite prose, whose thoughtful, moving and often disturbing work elevates war reportage and the memoir of conflict and loss to levels rarely seen since Michael Herr's
Dispatches or James Fenton's
All the Wrong Places.
A Stranger in Your Own City is that rarity:
a genuine melancholy masterpiece' -- William Dalrymple, author of RETURN OF A KING
