A Sky So Close
A Novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
This haunting coming-of-age story about a girl growing up in wartime Iraq was the subject of heated controversy when it was published in the Middle East; now in English, it offers American readers a rare chance to experience an Iraqi childhood.
The frank, determined narrator is a schoolgirl living in a small town in the Iraqi countryside when the book opens. Torn between the cultures of her parents, she loves the simple pleasures of provincial life in her father’s native land but, at the urging of her English mother, she is thrown into the study of Western music and ballet and becomes a devoted dancer by the time the family relocates to Baghdad. Even as the city around her is transformed by the blackouts and
deprivations of the war between Iran and Iraq, she propels herself passionately through the full range of teenage discovery. The death of her father, her first love affair, and her mother’s unexpected illness carry her into adulthood and ultimately to London, where she confronts, with surprising results, the other half of her East–West legacy.
A Sky So Close is a captivating look at contemporary Iraq from the inside out—a stunning re-creation of the surreality of life during wartime, and the story of a young woman coming to terms with the seemingly unbridgeable cultures from which she is formed.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A young woman comes of age in modern Iraq in this lyrical debut. The unnamed narrator recalls her early childhood on a farm in the small village of Zafraniya, outside of Baghdad. It is a mostly peaceful time in the country: the narrator attends the School of Music and Ballet in the mornings and her afternoons are spent playing among apricot trees. From the age of six, however, the conflicting values of East and West begin to disrupt her idyllic life. Her father, who works devising food flavorings and colors, is Iraqi; her mother is English and is not managing to adapt to the heat, the customs or her isolation. They argue constantly, and the narrator is aware that many see her as "the foreign woman's daughter." She is much closer to her father, who interests her in his work as she grows into adolescence. The family moves to Baghdad and the war with Iran begins soon after. Viewed mostly through the increasing changes in daily life rationing, travel restrictions and the dance school's closing the effects of war are juxtaposed against the girl's exposure to the beleaguered artistic community in Baghdad and her first love affair. The third section of the book shifts to England, where she travels with her ailing mother just as the Gulf War erupts. Khedairi writes with a certain distance and passivity that can be frustrating, but lovers of literary fiction will be pulled in by the poetic descriptions. Despite the aloofness of the narration, this quietly compelling story rings true.
