A Stranger in Your Own City

Travels in the Middle East's Long War

By: Ghaith Abdul-Ahad

Narrated by: Ghaith Abdul-Ahad

Length: 14 hrs

Publisher's summary

A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • An award-winning journalist’s powerful portrait of his native Baghdad, the people of Iraq, and twenty years of war.

“An essential insider account of the unravelling of Iraq…Driven by his intimate knowledge and deep personal stakes, Abdul-Ahad…offers an overdue reckoning with a broken history.”—Declan Walsh, author of The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Precarious State

“A vital archive of a time and place in history…Impossible to put down.”—Omar El Akkad, author of What Strange Paradise

The history of reportage has often depended on outsiders—Ryszard Kapuściński witnessing the fall of the shah in Iran, Frances FitzGerald observing the aftermath of the American war in Vietnam. What would happen if a native son was so estranged from his city by war that he could, in essence, view it as an outsider? What kind of portrait of a war-wracked place and people might he present?

A Stranger in Your Own City is award-winning writer Ghaith Abdul-Ahad’s vivid, shattering response. This is not a book about Iraq’s history or an inventory of the many Middle Eastern wars that have consumed the nation over the past several decades. This is the tale of a people who once lived under the rule of a megalomaniacal leader who shaped the state in his own image; a people who watched a foreign army invade, topple that leader, demolish the state, and then invent a new country; who experienced the horror of having their home fragmented into a hundred different cities.

When the “Shock and Awe” campaign began in March 2003, Abdul-Ahad was an architect. Within months he would become a translator, then a fixer, then a reporter for The Guardian and elsewhere, chronicling the unbuilding of his centuries-old cosmopolitan city. Beginning at that moment and spanning twenty years, Abdul-Ahad’s book decenters the West and in its place focuses on everyday people, soldiers, mercenaries, citizens blown sideways through life by the war, and the proliferation of sectarian battles that continue to this day. Here is their Iraq, seen from the inside: the human cost of violence, the shifting allegiances, the generational change.

A Stranger in Your Own City is a rare work of beauty and tragedy whose power and relevance lie in its attempt to return the land to the people to whom it belongs.

©2023 Ghaith Abdul-Ahad (P)2023 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“A powerful and beautifully written portrait of the soul and psychology of a nation reeling from one cataclysm to the next . . . This book isn’t merely a catalog of atrocity, though. Nor, compared to other books on the Iraq War, is it unduly grim. . . . Abdul-Ahad’s allegiance is to the actual Iraqi people, wronged by so many, by foreign invaders and corrupt politicians and criminals and militia commanders and their own worst impulses. The dead will be forgotten, the killers and bandits and soldiers will keep inventing new horrors, ‘but they all remain the same people—Iraqis.’ There is a challenge and a steely optimism there, one that would have rattled my confidence back in 2007, but that gives me hope in 2023.”—Phil Klay, The Wall Street Journal

“[Abdul-Ahad’s] kaleidoscopic view emphasizes aspects of ordinary Iraqi lives which are lost in the simplistic interpretations of outsiders.”—The New Yorker

“A tragic, brutal picture of the build-up to a conflict that engulfed a nation . . . Chronicles the past two decades of turmoil with an engaging blend of memoir, reportage and interviews. It is a story of catastrophic societal breakdown, culminating in violence and terror on an unprecedented scale . . . Bracing and heart-rending.”—Houman Barekat, The Guardian

Worth your time.

A brutal look into the lives of everyday Iraqis through decades of authoritarian kleptocracy, invasion, sectarianism, and corruption.

A waste of a credit.

Don’t bother. This author thinks the USA isn’t worthy of his praise. Not a good take.