Zubaida's Window

In the first novel in English by an Iraqi to focus on the 2003 invasion, Iqbal Al-Qazwini masterfully describes the tortured psyche of a woman who fled Iraq but still longs for her homeland. Like millions around the world, Iraqi exile Zubaida watches the invasion on her television. As she sits in her apartment in Berlin, the unreal and constantly flickering images of US forces closing in on Baghdad are her only connection to the war a world away. But unlike most viewers, she can remember the city of her childhood, where memories of her loving grandmother and of attending movies with her father mix with nightmarish images of hangings in Al-Tahrir Square. Struggling to deal with the horror on the television and the ghosts of her memory, Zubaida, in her grief, creates her own world, one in which she can almost go home. Haunting and lyrical, Zubaida's Window reveals the individual costs of war and the resilience of those who live through it.