The President's Gardens

by Al-Ramli, Muhsin; Leafgren, Luke

• ISBN13: 9780857056801
• ISBN10: 0857056808
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2019-05-28
• Publisher: MacLehose Press

Summary

In this extraordinary novel by heralded Iraqi author Muhsin Al-Ramli, One Hundred Years of Solitude meets The Kite Runner against the backdrop of Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

"A profoundly moving investigation of love, death, and injustice." --The Guardian

"A standard in contemporary Middle Eastern literature." --Booklist

"A stunning achievement." --The National

On the third day of Ramadan, a small village in Iraq wakes to find the severed heads of nine of its sons stacked in banana crates by the bus stop. One of them belonged to one of the most wanted men in Iraq, known to his friends as Ibrahim the Fated. How did this good and humble man earn the enmity of so many? What did he do to deserve such a death?

The answer lies in his lifelong friendship with Abdullah Kafka and Tariq the Befuddled, who each have their own remarkable stories to tell. It lies on the scarred, irradiated battlefields of the Gulf War and in the ashes of a revolution strangled in its cradle. It lies in the steadfast love of his wife and the festering scorn of his daughter.

And, above all, it lies behind the locked gates of the President's gardens, buried alongside the countless victims of a pitiless reign of terror.

Author Biography

Muhsin Al-Ramli is an expatriate Iraqi poet, playwright, short-story writer, novelist, and translator of several classics of Spanish literature. He is also the cofounder and editor of Alwah, a magazine of Arabic literature. Born in northern Iraq in 1967, Al-Ramli has lived and taught in Madrid since 1995. Published in Arabic in 2012, The President's Gardens was longlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF), known as the "Arabic Booker," the following year.

Luke Leafgren received his PhD in comparative literature in 2012 from Harvard University, where he teaches Arabic and serves as the Allston Burr Resident Dean of Mather House. He has translated several Arabic novels into English, including Dates on My Fingers, also by Muhsin Al-Ramli.