A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East's Long War

"This March is the 20th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. There is never going to be a clear figure of how many people died as a result of that catastrophic foreign policy decision, but it’s in the hundreds of thousands . A Stranger in Your Own City by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad is a beautiful book which tells that story from the point of view of a local resident, an architect, who later ended up working for foreign media, first as a fixer and then as a photographer and writer. The book opens with a chapter on “My First War”—about the Iran-Iraq war, talks about the years of sanctions, and then goes through everything that happened from 2003 up to the present. I couldn’t put it down. It’s like having a friend telling you what they lived through and finally being able to understand what happened and why things went so wrong. The chapters are short and manageable and the book includes his watercolours and line drawings (in an early chapter he references his Tintin books , always a good sign). Another important thing about this book: in spite of the awful subject matter, every now and then it’s very, very funny. Abdul-Ahad is scathing about foreign journalists’ crass approach to Sunni and Shia identities in Iraq in the wake of the invasion, so if that’s something you want to understand more fully, you may also want to look at The Caliph and the Imam: The Making of Sunnism and Shiism . It’s a global history of Sunni-Shia relations by Toby Matthiesen, a Middle East specialist at the University of Oxford."

"Ghaith Abdul-Ahad reported extensively for The Guardian and The Washington Post after the US invasion of Iraq and I remember reading his dispatches at the time and in the years since. Published on the 20th anniversary of the invasion, his book combines journalism, memoir and travel writing to tell the stories of the people caught up in the maelstrom as, to quote the author, ‘their world fragmented.’ One of the things about this book that really stood out to me was how it gives, vitally, an Iraqi-centred account. I felt that I was getting a 360º perspective of the situation, rather than stereotypes. It’s a powerful book. I think it reflects his sense of seeing his country change so dramatically over such a short period of time to the extent that he can feel lost in places that were once familiar. In many ways, he was perfectly placed to navigate what is obviously an incredibly difficult and dangerous situation, somethinng that he has experienced first hand. It was different to other books that I’ve read on the conflict and I really enjoyed his perspective. It’s a hard-hitting book, so perhaps I shouldn’t say ‘enjoy’—it’s a tough subject matter, to state the obvious. But it is a powerful book that stays with you."