Frankenstein in Baghdad

Summary

Man Booker International Prize finalist “Brave and ingenious.” (The New York Times) “Gripping, darkly humorous...profound.” (Phil Klay, best-selling author and National Book Award winner for Redeployment) “Extraordinary.... A devastating but essential read.” (Kevin Powers, best-selling 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 café — 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. 

©2018 Ahmed Saadawi (P)2018 Penguin Audio