Download or read book The Sirens of Baghdad written by Yasmina Khadra and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2008-05-06 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The third novel in Yasmina Khadra's bestselling trilogy about Islamic fundamentalism has the most compelling backdrop of any of his novels: Iraq in the wake of the American invasion. A young Iraqi student, unable to attend college because of the war, sees American soldiers leave a trail of humiliation and grief in his small village. Bent on revenge, he flees to the chaotic streets of Baghdad where insurgents soon realize they can make use of his anger. Eventually he is groomed for a secret terrorist mission meant to dwarf the attacks of September 11th, only to find himself struggling with moral qualms. The Sirens of Baghdad is a powerful look at the effects of violence on ordinary people, showing what can turn a decent human being into a weapon, and how the good in human nature can resist. “Compelling. . . . Khadra brings us deep into the hearts and minds of people living in unspeakable mental anguish.” —Los Angeles Times

Download or read book The Sirens of Baghdad written by Yasmina Khadra and published by Random House. This book was released on 2008 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Forced to leave the university when the Americans invade Iraq, a young man from a small desert village heads for Baghdad to join the resistance, until a top secret mission forces him to reconcile a proposed terrorist act with his own moral principles.

Download or read book Dreaming of Baghdad written by Haifa Zangana and published by The Feminist Press at CUNY. This book was released on 2009-08-01 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “With passion and commitment,” an exiled Iraqi woman recounts her time organizing resistance to Saddam Hussein and imprisonment in Abu Ghraib (Nawal El Saadawi, author of Zeina). In 1970s Iraq, the Ba’ath Party was at the height of its influence in the Middle East and popularity throughout the West. But a group of activists recognized the disastrous potential of the regime as its charismatic leader, Saddam Hussein, came to power. Haifa Zangana was among those who resisted Saddam’s rule, a small group of whom were captured and imprisoned at Abu Ghraib. Now, from a distance of time and place, Zangana writes about her incarceration, the agonizing loss of comrades to torture and death in prison, her safe yet haunted life so far away from friends, family, and her beloved country, and the ways memory conspires to make us forget. In this poetic, emotionally-tinged memoir, the author of Women on a Journey: Between Baghdad and London “drags politics down from the realm of the abstract into the mud, fear, and loneliness of personal experience and psychological ruin that is life under dictatorship” (Christian Parenti, author of The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq).

Download or read book The Swallows of Kabul written by Yasmina Khadra and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in Afghanistan's capital city of Kabul, this extraordinary novel "puts a human face on the suffering inflicted by the Taliban" (San Francisco Chronicle), taking readers into the seemingly divergent lives of two couples—and depicting with compassion and exquisite details the mentality of Islamic fundamentalists and the complexities of the Muslim world. Mohsen comes from a family of wealthy shopkeepers whom the Taliban has destroyed; Zunaira, his wife, exceedingly beautiful, was once a brilliant teacher and is now no longer allowed to leave her home without an escort or covering her face. Intersecting their world is Atiq, a prison keeper, a man who has sincerely adopted the Taliban ideology and struggles to keep his faith, and his wife, Musarrat, who once rescued Atiq and is now dying of sickness and despair. Desperate, exhausted Mohsen wanders through Kabul when he is surrounded by a crowd about to stone an adulterous woman. Numbed by the hysterical atmosphere and drawn into their rage, he too throws stones at the face of the condemned woman buried up to her waist. With this gesture the lives of all four protagonists move toward their destinies. Yasmina Khadra brings readers into the hot, dusty streets of Kabul and offers them an unflinching but compassionate insight into a society that violence and hypocrisy have brought to the edge of despair.

Download or read book Khalil written by Yasmina Khadra and published by Nan A. Talese. This book was released on 2021-02-16 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the internationally bestselling author of The Attack and The Swallows of Kabul, a gripping first-person narrative about one young man's involvement in France's worst terrorist attack. Khalil, a twenty-three-year-old Belgian of Moroccan descent, plans to detonate a suicide vest in a crowd outside the Stade de France on November 13, 2015. Explosions are rocking Paris, at cafés and the Bataclan theater, and when other bombs drive the stadium crowd to flee in his direction, near the Metro, his time has come. He presses his button, and . . . nothing. Fearing he has failed in his mission for Fraternel Solidarity (FS), an ISIS affiliate, Khalil has little choice but to blend in with his would-be victims and run. Back in Belgium, he must lie low and avoid his militant brethren and the authorities. He relies on his family and friends for places to stay, but he keeps the truth about himself secret. All the while, he contemplates what he almost did, and what he will do next--particularly when it comes to light that his vest accidently had been a harmless training unit all along, and FS has a new mission planned for him. In this daring, propulsive literary thriller, Yasmina Khadra takes readers to the margins of Europe's glittering capitals, through neighborhoods isolated by government neglect and popular apathy, if not outright racism. And he brings to life an unusual protagonist, a young man struggling with family, religion, and politics who makes fateful choices, and in doing so dramatizes powerful questions about society and human nature.

Download or read book Sirens written by Laura Naylor Colbert and published by Warriors Publishing Group. This book was released on 2019-10-29 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bronze Medal Winner from the Military Writers Society of America! There’s a steep learning curve for every American soldier who deploys to the Middle East war zone. Much of that involves culture shock, and the excitement and confusion also applies to female soldiers. And when that female soldier is also a Military Police Officer, the curve gets bent way out of shape. Laura Colbert was heartland-bred and tough enough when the Army sent her to an MP unit in Baghdad, but she quickly discovered soldiering in Iraq involved a lot more than she expected. How to establish her military cop cred? How to deal with chauvinistic soldiers? How to deal with Iraqis—men who disrespected her and women who initially distrusted her? How much military law applied in a lawless land? And dealing with even the simplest things, like how to pee standing up. Laura managed it and survived, but the learning curve just bent in another direction when she came home from war suffering with stress and anxiety that eventually bloomed into Post-Traumatic Stress. “...Since she got back, Naylor has been on a new mission, one she believes also serves her country: She shows...what the war is really like for the soldiers who have to fight it.” —Dee J. Hall, Wisconsin State Journal “Colbert...has told her story...in the hopes of relating the reality of her war to people half a world away who experienced it only through increasingly small TV news clips and articles in print publications.” —Nathan Phelps, USA TODAY Network

Download or read book The Baghdad Eucharist written by Sinan Antoon and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in 2010, Hail Mary unfolds over 24 hours in Baghdad. The events of the novel take place around two characters from an Iraqi Christian family, drawn together under the same roof by the chaos in the country. Youssef is an elderly man who is alone. He refuses to emigrate and leave the house he built, where he has lived for half a century. He still clings to hope and memories of a happy past. Maha is a young woman whose life has been torn apart by the sectarian violence. Her family has been made homeless and become separated from her, resulting in her living as a refugee in her own country, lodging in Youssef's house; with her husband she waits to emigrate from a country she feels does not want her.

Download or read book Cousin K written by Yasmina Khadra and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2013-04-01 with total page 93 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ""Such was the battle that raged between Cousin K and me: good done badly; evil done well." So relates the unnamed narrator of Cousin K as he launches into the sad tale of his childhood. With his father brutally killed as a traitor during Algeria's war of independence and his older brother an army officer far away, the young boy lives reclusively with his mother, an unfeeling woman who ignores him entirely. At fourteen he directs his thirst for affection toward his nine-year-old cousin, K, who has come to stay with his family for the summer. But so far from reciprocating his passionate regard for her, the little girl steals the affections of his mother and mocks and humiliates him resulting in his love becoming hopelessly entangled with hatred. Now, fate places a young woman in the narrator's path when he rescues her after a violent attack. From her he once more begs for the love that his mother and K always refused him, and her rejection revives the same hatred and illuminates the permanent emotional scars left on him from a lifetime of emotional neglect and derision, resulting in dire consequences."--

Download or read book Wolf Dreams written by Yasmina Khadra and published by Amazon Publishing. This book was released on 2006-06 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The book that best describes how an Islamic Fundimentalist is formed." New York Times How does a handsome young man who keeps company with poets and dreams of fame and fortune in the movie business turn into a brutal killer who massacres women and children without turning a hair? The story follows Nafa Walid, heart-throb of the Casbah, as he gradually loses control of his destiny and becomes drawn into the Islamic Fundamentalist movement. Wolf Dreams illustrates what happens when disillusion intersects with the persuasive voice of fundamentalism and the chaos of civil war.

Download or read book I jaam written by Sinan Antoon and published by City Lights Books. This book was released on 2007 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A risky and risqué prison memoir depicts the collective nightmare of life under Saddam.

Download or read book Interruptions written by Massud Alemi and published by Ibex Publishers, Inc.. This book was released on 2008 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fiction. Middle Eastern Studies. Gay & Lesbian Studies. On a hot summer's day in Tehran, Farzin Rouhani leaves his house on a short walk to meet his lover. Suddenly he encounters a political demonstration and his routine is interrupted. The secret police arrest him on suspicion of conspiring to overthrow the Iranian government. Although he is completely innocent, telling the truth is not an option. Facing his interrogator, Farzin has to decide: does he want to be jailed for subversion or for revealing that he is gay? INTERRUPTIONS examines the various paths we choose when our day-to-day life is interrupted. On another level, it is also an intimate look at the interrupted psyche of a country whose dreams of freedom and justice have repeatedly been thwarted. Alemi's examination of Iranian society and its complex rituals is fresh and full of life. Continual political upheavals in a country dominated by fanatics form the backdrop--where the rich history of the Rouhani family is interwoven with the misfortunes of a nation.

Download or read book The Dictator s Last Night written by Yasmina Khadra and published by Gallic Books. This book was released on 2015-10-16 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: October 2011. In the dying days of the Libyan civil war, Muammar Gaddafi is hiding out in his home town of Sirte along with his closest advisors. They await a convoy that will take them south, away from encroaching rebel forces and NATO aerial attacks. The mood is sombre. In what will be his final night, Gaddafi reflects on an extraordinary life, whilst still raging against the West, his fellow Arab nations and the ingratitude of the Libyan people. In this gripping imagining of the last hours of President Gaddafi, Yasmina Khadra provides us with fascinating insight into the mind of one of the most complex and controversial figures of recent history.

Download or read book The Flying Carpet of Small Miracles written by Hala Jaber and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2009 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From prizewinning foreign correspondent Jaber comes the inspiring true story of her longing to have a child, two orphaned Iraqi girls in need of a mother, and the things that love and grief can teach about family and hope.

Download or read book The Attack written by Yasmina Khadra and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2007-05-08 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling author of The Swallows of Kabul comes this timely and haunting novel that powerfully illuminates the devastating human costs of terrorism.Dr. Amin Jaafari is an Arab-Israeli surgeon at a hospital in Tel Aviv. As an admired and respected member of his community, he has carved a space for himself and his wife, Sihem, at the crossroads of two troubled societies. Jaafari’s world is abruptly shattered when Sihem is killed in a suicide bombing.As evidence mounts that Sihem could have been responsible for the catastrophic bombing, Jaafari begins a tortured search for answers. Faced with the ultimate betrayal, he must find a way to reconcile his cherished memories of his wife with the growing realization that she may have had another life, one that was entirely removed from the comfortable, modern existence that they shared.

Download or read book One Hundred and One Nights written by Benjamin Buchholz and published by Back Bay Books. This book was released on 2011-12-01 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After 13 years in America, Abu Saheeh has returned to his native Iraq, a nation transformed by the American military presence. Alone in a new city, he has exactly what he wants: freedom from his past. Then he meets Layla, a whimsical fourteen-year-old girl who enchants him with her love of American pop culture. Enchanted by Layla's stories and her company, Abu Saheeh settles into the city's rhythm and begins rebuilding his life. But two sudden developments -- his alliance with a powerful merchant and his employment of a hot-headed young assistant -- reawaken painful memories, and not even Layla may be able to save Abu Saheeh from careening out of control and endangering all around them. A breathtaking tale of friendship, love, and betrayal, One Hundred and One Nights is an unforgettable novel about the struggle for salvation and the power of family.

Download or read book Under Your Skin written by Sabine Durrant and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-04-28 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If you loved Gone Girl, then make this page-turning debut next on your reading list: “Sabine Durrant offers more twists than a rollercoaster in her thriller Under Your Skin, which proves you can trust no one” (Good Housekeeping). Gaby Mortimer is the woman who has it all. But everything changes when she finds a body near her home. She’s shaken and haunted by the image of the lifeless young woman, and frightened that the killer, still at large, could strike again. Before long, the police have a lead. The evidence points to a very clear suspect. One Gaby never saw coming… Full of brilliant twists and turns, Under Your Skin is a dark and suspenseful psychological thriller that will make you second guess everything. Because you can never be too sure about anything, especially when it comes to murder.

Download or read book The Hand That First Held Mine written by Maggie O'Farrell and published by Knopf Canada. This book was released on 2024-04-02 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: International bestseller and winner of the 2010 Costa Novel—a gorgeously written story of love and motherhood from the author of Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait. When the sophisticated Innes Kent turns up on her doorstep, Lexie Sinclair realizes she cannot wait any longer for her life to begin, and leaves for London. There, at the heart of the 1950s Soho art scene, she carves out a new life. In the present day, Elina and Ted are reeling from the difficult birth of their first child. Elina struggles to reconcile the demands of motherhood with her sense of herself as an artist, and Ted is disturbed by memories of his own childhood that don’t tally with his parents’ version of events. As Ted begins to search for answers, an extraordinary portrait of two women is revealed, separated by fifty years, but connected in ways that neither could ever have expected.