On a strategic hill overlooking the frontier, Iraqi and Iranian troops battle for access to a water tank. The troops are thirsty and on the brink of madness. They are, moreover, characters in a novel being written by an Iraqi journalist. That is, if he is given the chance to write it, a chance denied him by an Iraqi major who is in charge of a military prison and commands the journalist to write a fictitious report about a murder in the camp in hope of demoralising enemy soldiers.At...

Shortlisted for the IODE Violet Downey Book Award and the Manitoba Young Readers' Choice Award, selected for the USBBY Outstanding International Book List, the CCBC Choices List, the Bank Street College of Education's Book of the Month, the Bankstreet College Best Children’s Books of the Year 2013, and the Capitol Choices Noteworthy Titles for Children and Teens ListOn a military base in post-Taliban Afghanistan, American authorities have just imprisoned a teenaged...

Does one honor one’s country or one’s heart? Malka Marom explores this classic dilemma in her stunningly powerful first novel, an extraordinary tale of people caught up in a violent and seemingly endless historical conflict, compelled by love and grief to transcend it.Sulha tells the story of Leora, who, twenty years after her husband was killed in the Sinai War, is empowered by law to decide whether or not to allow her only son to serve high-risk duty as his father did. As Abraham...

The Ancient Egyptian gods have defeated all the other pantheons and claimed dominion over the earth, dividing it into warring factions. Lt. David Westwynter, a British soldier, stumbles into Freegypt, the only place to have remained independent of the gods' influence. There, he encounters the followers of a humanist leader known as the Lightbringer, who has vowed to rid mankind of the shackles of divine oppression. As the world heads towards an apocalyptic battle, there is far more to this...

It is April 2003. American forces have taken Baghdad and are now charged with winning hearts and minds. But this vital tipping point is barely recognized for what it is, as a series of miscalculations and blunders fuels an already-simmering insurgency intent on making Iraq the next graveyard of empires.In dazzling and propulsive prose, Brian Van Reet explores the lives on both sides of the battle lines: Cassandra, a nineteen-year-old gunner on an American Humvee who is captured dur...

Imagine that a jewel-like garden overlooking Kabul is your ancestral home. Imagine a kitchen made fragrant with saffron strands and cardamom pods simmering in an authentic pilau. Now remember that you were born in London, your family in exile, and that you have never seen Afghanistan in peacetime.These are but the starting points of Saira Shah’s memoir, by turns inevitably exotic and unavoidably heartbreaking, in which she explores her family’s history in and out of Afghanistan. As...

A rich and greedy sultan meets his match in a VERY cheeky little red rooster…Hilariously wacky tale by bestselling author of War Horse.The rich and greedy sultan loves his jewels more than anything, so when he loses a diamond button he is furious!Especially as a naughty little red rooster seems determined to keep it…A marvellously funny tale by master storyteller, Michael Morpurgo.

Savushun chronicles the life of a Persian family during the Allied occupation of Iran during World War II. It is set in Shiraz, a town which evokes images of Persepolis and pre-Islamic monuments, the great poets, the shrines, Sufis, and nomadic tribes within a historical web of the interests, privilege and influence of foreign powers; corruption, incompetence and arrogance of persons in authority; the paternalistic landowner-peasant relationship; tribalism; and the fear of famine. The stor...

In a war of lies, the truth can kill.Jonah Said is a loner and a troublemaker, shipped off by the British army to work with the UN in the buffer zone between Kuwait and Iraq, because they want him out of harm's way.Big mistake.From the minute he lands, Jonah becomes drawn into a deadly spiral of corruption and conspiracy involving Russians, Americans, Arabs and Brits - and none of them tells the truth.And the truth is more dangerous than even Jonah can imagi...

At the age of twenty, an Iranian student named Zarah Ghahramani was swept off the streets of Tehran and taken to the notorious Evin prison, where criminals and political dissidents were held side by side in conditions of legendary brutality. Her crime, she asserts, was in wanting to slide back her headscarf to feel the sun on a few inches of her hair.That modest desire led her to a political activism fueled by the fearless idealism of the young. Her parents begged her to be prudent,...

One Hundred Years of Solitude meets The Kite Runner in Saddam Hussein's Iraq."A contemporary tragedy of epic proportions. No author is better placed than Muhsin Al-Ramli, already a star in the Arabic literary scene, to tell this story. I read it in one sitting".Hassan Blasim, winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for The Iraqi Christ.On the third day of Ramadan, the villa...

A disillusioned reporter joins three fellow Westerners on a journey of discovery through the raging fires of a brutal East African conflictWith his own life in flux, Timothy Darcy, an Australian journalist, finds escape in the ongoing turmoil of Eritrea. Entering the war-torn East African region with three Western strangers on missions of their own—Christine, a young Frenchwoman searching for her lost cinematographer father; Lady Julia, an aging British feminist; an...