I STARED AT THE NIGHT OF THE CITY

Iraqi Kurdistan at the turn of the twenty-first century is a territory ruled by strongmen, revolutionaries, fixers, bureaucrats and the “Barons” who control everything from livestock and land to Kurdish cultural life. Defying the absolute power wielded by the Barons, a band of friends led by a poet embarks on an odyssey to find the bodies of two lovers killed unjustly by the authorities. The Barons respond by attempting to crush these would-be avengers, though their real war is waged against the imagination itself – a prized, elusive commodity for which intellectuals, merchants, political elites and humble workers all search in one way or another. Told by several unreliable narrators in a kaleidoscope of fragments that all eventually cohere, this novel is a lyrical allegory of contemporary Kurdistan – so much in the news nowadays, but so little understood.