Naphtalene: A Novel of Baghdad (Women Writing the Middle East)

“This first novel by an Iraqi woman to be published in English in the United States is a hallucinatory incantation…an ode to a city…(with) its private courtyards and public baths where the women in Huda’s life rage and pray and love and scream.”—Ms. Magazine

Now in paperback, Naphtalene captures a fierce and defiant young girl as she struggles to form her identity in 1950s Baghdad amid a world of unfulfilled women and family tragedies.

Iraqi exile Alia Mamdouh is a journalist, essayist, and novelist living in Paris who received the Naguib Mahfouz Prize for Literature in 2004.