Novels / Fiction About Iraq
Explore the best novels and fiction books about Iraq, featuring gripping war stories, cultural insights, and compelling narratives. Discover must-read Iraqi literature today.
Book
The Waiting List
by Dayzī Amīr
Daisy Al-Amir is one of the more visible figures in women's fiction in the Arab world today. This collection of stories, originally published in Lebanon as Ala La'ihat al-Intizar, is the most recent of her five publications. Her stories intimately reflect women's experiences in the chaotic worlds of the Lebanese civil war and the rise of Saadam Hussain as Iraq's leader. Set in Iraq, Cyprus, and Lebanon, the stories shed light on an unusual Middle East refugee experience—that of a cultural refugee, a divorced woman who is educated, affluent, and alone. Al-Amir is also a poet and novelist, whose sensual prose grows out of a long tradition of Iraqi poetry. But one also finds existential themes in her works, as Al-Amir tries to balance what seems fated and what seems arbitrary in the turbulent world she inhabits. She deals with time and space in a minimalist, surreal style, while studying the disappointments of life through the subjective lens of memory. Honestly facing the absence of family and the instability of place, Al-Amir gives lifelike qualities to the inanimate objects of her rapidly changing world. In addition to the stories, two examples of the author's experimental poems are included. In her introduction, Mona Mikhail places these stories and poems in the context of contemporary Islamic literature and gender studies.
Book
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor
by John Barth
While retracing the legendary voyages of Sindbad the Sailor, journalist Simon William Behler finds himself in Sindbad's household in medieval Baghdad and competes with Sindbad in a storytelling marathon in the hopes of finding way back to the modern world. Reprint.
Book
They Came to Baghdad
by Agatha Christie
Victoria is pursued by an unknown power that threatened not only her, but the fate of the entire world.
Book
Desert Fire
by David Hagberg
The nationally bestselling, award-winning author of Countdown returns with this highly-acclaimed, explosive global thriller. Saddam Hussein wants an atom bomb--and those standing in his way killed. His most accomplished assassin and his sensuous but sadistic daughter are out to do just that--when confronted by the West's finest counter-intelligence agent.
Book
The Angel with One Hundred Wings
by Daniel Horch
A beautiful adventure story and romance, this tale opens in the City of Peace, as Baghdad was once called. With engaging characters and rich imagery drawn from alchemy, the Koran, and early Islamic mystics, this is a literary masterpiece that captures the magic of the Middle East.
Book
A Sky So Close
by Betool Khedairi
Evocative and exquisite, A Sky So Close was first published to controversy in the Middle East. Now in English, it has received wide acclaim as a haunting coming-of-age tale that plunges into the heart of the cultural clash between East and West.
Book
To Die in Babylon
by Harold Livingston
From the death-filled skies over Baghdad to the byzantine intrigues of the White House to the free-fire alleyways of Kuwait City, bestselling author Harold Livingston takes you into the brief but vivid inferno of the Gulf War, and into four separate lives, unexpectedly and irrevocably intertwined. From the author of Ride a Tiger. Martin's Press.
Book
Kiss the Dust
by Elizabeth Laird
Her father's involvement with the Kurdish resistance movement in Iraq forces 13-year-old Tara to flee with her family over the border into Iran, where they face an unknown future