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.
Elizabeth Loudon is a former college lecturer and charity development consultant. She has an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and an MA in English from Cambridge University, and has taught at Smith, Amherst, and Williams Colleges. She’s published fiction and memoir in the Denver Quarterly, INTRO, North American Review, and Gettysburg Review, among others, and received a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship. She drew on her experiences traveling in Iraq and Lebanon in the 1970s when writing A Stranger in Baghdad, her first novel. It was longlisted for the Bridport Novel Award and won the Stroud Book Festival Fiction Competition. She lives in London.
My thoughts: bringing Baghdad in the 1930s to life beautifully, this is a moving and complex novel about family, secrets, spies and loss. Diane’s impulsive marriage to a young Iraqi doctor, will lead her down dangerous paths. She moves with Ibrahim to his family’s home, where his widowed mother reigns and his sisters resent his new wife. Desperate and lonely, she clings to the British Embassy and the local contingent of ex-pats, which brings her into Duncan Claybourne’s orbit and into danger.
Relayed to daughter Mona, years later in London, Duncan’s story of espionage and coups, murder and her mother, is shocking and terribly sad. Mona completes the story with her own. The loss of her father, brothers and home, as she and Diane fled to England. While she’s made a life for herself, there have always been questions and now she finally has some answers. But has what she’s learnt from the former spy helped her at all or left her with more?
Rich and rewarding, this is a clever and enthralling thriller set in a lost world, vividly written and utterly captivating.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in the blog tour but all opinions remain my own.
ramblingmads 