A junk dealer named Hadi, living in wartime Baghdad, collects body parts from various bombings and stitches them together to create a monster as voracious and terrify-ing as the US occupation. One of the great contemporary novels to emerge from Iraq.

A Kafkaesque bildungsroman about Jawad, who is born into a family of undertakers but dreams of becom-ing a sculptor. Read this beautiful novel to understand what dictator-ship, sanctions, and occupation looked like from the perspective of Iraqis.

Allawi, a former defense and finance minister, offers a detailed chronology of the formation of the occupation government, exposing the craven, feckless ways of the Iraqi political elite.