I Remember Fallujah: A Novel

An elderly man, Rami, hospitalized in Paris with terminal cancer, suddenly loses his memory. To help him remember his childhood, his son begins to ask questions about a time in his life he has never discussed. In the process, the son begins to trace the story of modern Iraq, reconstructing Rami’s childhood in Fallujah and weaving together stories of his own youth in Paris as a French-born Iraqi exile. Rami’s unhappy family splinters over love and politics; an opponent of both the monarchy and Saddam Hussein in the 1950s and 1960s, Rami is imprisoned and tortured, eventually escaping to gain asylum in France. His son visits Baghdad and Fallujah during summer vacations, puzzled by his family’s political reticence and by how his once prosperous cousins are impoverished by the sanctions regime of the 1990s. A visit the father and son take together in 2009, after Saddam’s overthrow by the U.S. invasion, ends in dispiriting violence as the son sifts through the legacy his father’s country bequeathed him. Alani, a French journalist, paints a haunting picture of modern Iraq through the eyes of its bewildered children.