LONGLISTED FOR THE BRIDPORT NOVEL AWARD
In beautifully rendered prose, a mother and a daughter struggle as
outsiders in Baghdad and London in this intergenerational drama set
against a background of political tension and intrigue
"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 British Embassy officer in Baghdad. When the
king dies in a mysterious accident, Ibrahim and his family suspect Diane
of colluding with Duncan and the British.
Summoning up the vanished world of mid-twentieth-century Baghdad,
Elizabeth Loudon's richly evocative story of one family calls into
question British attitudes and policies in Iraq and offers up a
penetrating reflection on cross-cultural marriage and the lives of women
caught between different worlds.
