Author: Betool Khedairi
Publisher: Anchor
Keywords: novel, close, sky
Number of Pages: 256
Published: 2002-05-14
List price: $13.95
ISBN-10: 0385720785
ISBN-13: 9780385720786

In this elegant, incisive debut, a young girl comes of age while aching for a sense of belonging. Daughter of an Iraqi father and an English mother, the unnamed narrator struggles with isolation both in the traditional Iraqi countryside where she’s raised and at the Western school of music and ballet that her mother insists she attend. Though she finds some semblance of solace in dance, her trials increase when her family moves to Baghdad. Then comes the outbreak of war, which compels her to move with her mother to England, where her most pointed heartaches await. Gently poetic but emotional

Author: Betool Khedairi
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Keywords: novel, absent
Number of Pages: 240
Published: 2007-07-10
List price: $13.95
ISBN-10: 0812977424
ISBN-13: 9780812977424

Dalal is a young woman living in a crowded Baghdad apartment with the childless aunt and uncle who raised her. In the same building, Umm Mazin, a fortune-teller, offers her customers cures for their physical and romantic ailments, Saad the hairdresser attends to a dwindling number of female customers, and Ilham, a nurse, escapes the stark realities of her hospital job in dreams of her long-lost French mother. Despite the damaging effects of bombings and international sanctions on their world, all the residents try to maintain normal lives.Hoping to bring in much-needed cash by selling honey, D