A Stranger in Baghdad

WINNER OF THE 2024 SHARJAH AWARD FOR THE BEST INTERNATIONAL FICTION NAMED ONE OF '51 FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2023' (WASHINGTON INDEPENDENT REVIEW OF BOOKS) LONGLISTED FOR THE BRIDPORT NOVEL AWARD An intergenerational drama rendered in beautiful prose featuring the struggles of a mother and daughter to navigate as outsiders in Baghdad and London“Who would be charmed by tales of life in the beautiful old house on the banks of the Tigris—looted now no doubt, its shutters torn and the courtyard strewn with mattresses?”One night in 2003, Anglo-Iraqi psychiatrist Mona Haddad has a surprise visitor to her London office, an old acquaintance Duncan Claybourne. But why has he come? Will his confession finally lay bare what happened to her family before they escaped Iraq? Their stories begin in 1937, when Mona’s mother Diane, a lively Englishwoman newly married to Ibrahim, an ambitious Iraqi doctor, meets Duncan by chance. Diane is working as a nanny for the Iraqi royal family. Duncan is a young Brit