Review of Leilah Nadir’s The Orange Trees Of Baghdad

Vancouver-based author and journalist Leilah Nadir’s new book, The Orange Trees Of Baghdad was reviewed by Alexander Varty in Straight.com:

“Both a family history and an acute analysis of what has happened to Iraq since the first Gulf War in 1991, The Orange Trees of Baghdad is unique in that it is not firsthand reportage. Instead, it is compiled from interviews with family members taped in London and Beirut and on an airliner high above the Atlantic, from letters and e-mails, and from telephone conversations. But this remove is what gives Nadir's book its terrible poignancy: it was written without its author ever having seen the city that her father and his ancestors called home.

Yearning and exile pervade its pages as surely as do horror and pity, and the sad truth is that even if conditions do improve to the point that Nadir can safely visit the city of her dreams, she'll never know what it truly was like before the bombing started, before the doctors and teachers fled, before the war.

Read the full review here.