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

SELECTED BY THE FINANCIAL TIMES AND DAUNTS BOOKS AS A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023
WINNER OF THE EDWARD STANFORD TRAVEL BOOK OF THE YEAR 2024
ONE OF PROSPECT'S POLITICS & REPORTAGE BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2023

Exquisite . . . A genuine, melancholy masterpiece' WILLIAM DALRYMPLE
'A journalistic marvel' JAMES MEEK
'A powerful, unforgettable book' NADIFA MOHAMMED

From Orwell Prize winning journalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad comes a searing and nuanced biography of a lost Iraq

This is the story of a people who once lived under the rule of a megalomaniac leader who shaped the state in his own image. Then one day, after yet another war, a foreign army invaded, toppled the leader, destroyed the state, and proceeded to invent a new country. This is the story of a people who watched with horror as their world fragmented into a hundred different cities, as walls rose between them and bodies piled in the streets.

From the American invasion to the Arab Spring, ISIS and beyond, A Stranger in Your Own City offers a remarkable de-centring of the West in the history and contemporary situation of the region. What comes to the fore is the effect on the ground: the human cost, the shifting allegiances, the generational change.

'Shatters western assumptions . . . and offers cautious hope' The Observer
'Haunting' Financial Times