Frankenstein in Baghdad

By Ahmed Saadawi

International Booker Prize finalist

Winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction

"Brave and ingenious." --The New York Times

"Gripping, darkly humorous . . . profound." --Phil Klay, bestselling author and National Book Award winner for Redeployment

"Extraordinary . . . A devastating but essential read." --Kevin Powers, bestselling author and National Book Award finalist for The Yellow Birds

From the rubble-strewn streets of U.S.-occupied Baghdad, Hadi--a scavenger and an oddball fixture at a local caf --collects human body parts and stitches them together to create a corpse. His goal, he claims, is for the government to recognize the parts as people and to give them proper burial. But when the corpse goes missing, a wave of eerie murders sweeps the city, and reports stream in of a horrendous-looking criminal who, though shot, cannot be killed. Hadi soon realizes he's created a monster, one that needs human flesh to survive--first from the guilty, and then from anyone in its path. A prizewinning novel by "Baghdad's new literary star" (The New York Times), Frankenstein in Baghdad captures with white-knuckle horror and black humor the surreal reality of contemporary Iraq.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0143128795
• ISBN13: 9780143128793
• Release Date: January 2018
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.52 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.1" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

utterly devastating

from the first chapter, there was not a single moment of this book that i felt bored. every single character was so deeply human and made this story feel so intimate. i felt like i had come to know all of those people personally and every single time anything happened to any of them i wept. the last three pages just ruined my life, i have said a billion times over the past week that nothing would make me more content than if the story never ended (perhaps that is my american gluttony....) but my goodness did Ahmed Saadawi finish telling it in such a monumental way