Kirjahaku

WINNER OF THE POLARI FIRST BOOK PRIZE 2017 “A remarkable debut.” - The Huffington Post “Freewheeling and incendiary.” - London Review of Books “…vibrant, wrenching début novel...sensuous and caustic, full of smoke and blood.” - The New Yorker A Middle-Eastern capital caught in the revolutionary wave of the Arab Spring. A day in the life of a young man disillusioned with both East and West and struggling to find a place for himself in a society ruled by hypocrisy and contradictions. Rasa works as an interpreter for Western journalists by day and divides his nights between the Guapa, an underground nightclub where the city’s clandestine LGBT community congregates, and his secret lover Taymour. Every night Taymour sneaks into the house Rasa shares with his overbearing grandmother, the woman who raised him. When she finds them in bed together on the eve of Taymour’s wedding day, all hell breaks loose. That same day Rasa learns his best friend, the famous drag queen Majid, has been arrested by the police. Unable to go home, afraid for Majid’s fate, and heartbroken by Taymour’s determination to keep living a double life, Rasa’s fragile balance collapses, while all around him the brief, intense season of public protest is cut short by the regime’s repression and the rapid rise of the hard-line Islamist movement. “This immensely readable novel is fluent, passionate and emotionally honest. Equally astute in its analysis of Arab and American mores, the book’s characters are nuanced and dynamic; it gives fresh life to the maxim 'the personal is political'.” - The Guardian “Guapa offers an intimate, complex portrait of gay life in the Arab world, a subject rarely explored in fiction.” - Gay Times

A sweeping, multi-generational saga that traces the fractured bonds between three Iraqi-British sisters In the summer of 2014, three estranged sisters are drawn back into each other’s orbits through the discovery of their late father’s lost paintings. As Mediha, Zainab, and Ishtar lay claim to his legacy—an inheritance laced with exile, betrayal, and an Iraq they no longer recognise—Zainab’s son Nizar, a war correspondent haunted by his time on the front lines, returns to the family fold. As summer bleeds into autumn and the truth about the paintings unfurls, the family is forced to confront the personal and political betrayals that tore them apart. Spanning continents and decades, Floodlines grapples with grief and memory, and charts the emotional and political aftershocks of a century of war and revolution in Iraq and beyond. Inspired by the artistic legacy of Haddad’s great uncle, the Iraqi modernist painter Jewad Selim, Floodlines explores family, queerness, and the wounds of (neo)colonialism in haunting, visceral prose.

A gay man in the Middle East wrestles with identity, love, and the upheaval of his country in this "vibrant, wrenching debut novel" (The New Yorker). Set over the course of twenty-four hours, Guapa follows Rasa, a gay man living in an unnamed Arab country, as he tries to carve out a life for himself in the midst of political and social upheaval. Rasa spends his days translating for Western journalists and pining for the nights when he can sneak his lover, Taymour, into his room. One night Rasa's grandmother, the woman who raised him, catches them in bed together. The following day his best friend, Maj--a fiery activist and drag queen star of the underground bar, Guapa--is arrested by the police. Ashamed to go home and face his grandmother, and reeling from the potential loss of the three most important people in his life, Rasa roams the city's slums and prisons, the lavish weddings of the country's elite, and the bars where outcasts and intellectuals drink to a long-lost revolution. Each new encounter leads him closer to confronting his own identity, as he revisits his childhood and probes the secrets that haunt his family. As Rasa confronts the simultaneous collapse of political hope and his closest personal relationships, he is forced to discover the roots of his alienation and try to re-emerge into a society that may never accept him.