Muhsin Al-Ramli Books

One Hundred Years of Solitude meets The Kite Runner in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. "A contemporary tragedy of epic proportions. No author is better placed than Muhsin Al-Ramli, already a star in the Arabic literary scene, to tell this story. I read it in one sitting". Hassan Blasim, winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for The Iraqi Christ. On the third day of Ramadan, the village wakes to find the severed heads of nine of its sons stacked in banana crates by the bus stop. One of them belonged to one of the most wanted men in Iraq, known to his friends as Ibrahim the Fated. How did this good and humble man earn the enmity of so many? What did he do to deserve such a death? The answer lies in his lifelong friendship with Abdullah Kafka and Tariq the Befuddled, who each have their own remarkable stories to tell. It lies on the scarred, irradiated battlefields of the Gulf War and in the ashes of a revolution strangled in its cradle. It lies in the steadfast love of his wife and the festering scorn of his daughter. And, above all, it lies behind the locked gates of The President's Gardens, buried alongside the countless victims of a pitiless reign of terror. Translated from the Arabic by Luke Leafgren

The follow-up to the internationally acclaimed The President's Gardens.On the sixth day of Ramadan, in a land without bananas, Qisma leaves for Baghdad with her husband-to-be to find the body of her father. But in the bloodiest year of a bloody war, how will she find one body among thousands?For Tariq, this is more than just a marriage of convenience: the beautiful, urbane Qisma must be his, body and soul. But can a sheikh steeped in genteel tradition share a tranquil bed with a modern Iraqi woman?The President has been deposed, and the garden of Iraq is full of presidents who will stop at nothing to take his place. Qisma is afraid - afraid for her son, afraid that it is only a matter of time before her father's murderers come for her.The only way to survive is to take a slice of Iraq for herself. But ambition is the most dangerous drug of all, and it could just seal Qisma's fate.

Han transcurrido diez años desde que Selim, un exiliado iraquí que trabaja en Madrid, huyó de la dictadura, la guerra, y las estrictas tradiciones familiares y religiosas de su país. Su tranquila vida se ve alterada el día en que se encuentra con su padre, de quien no había tenido noticias durante años, ahora convertido en un irreconocible personaje. La religión, la guerra, la muerte y el amor sirven como base para presentar conflictos sociales o morales con una espléndida sensibilidad poética. El autor manifiesta aquí una serie de dualidades presentes en el orden filosófico de las sociedades actuales. "Mushin Al-Ramli es uno de los más importantes novelistas y dramaturgos iraquíes y traductor al árabe de los clásicos castellanos". El Cultural del Diario El Mundo, 20 de marzo de 2003, España. "Una novela de una intensidad emocionante, hermosa en evocaciones y ternura, capaz de sugerir contrastes y puntos de conexión por su fuerza entre las culturas occidentales y orientales. Un regalo para el pensamiento y los sentidos". Manuel Francisco Reina