Widely praised in the Arab world, renowned author Sinan Antoon's fourth and most sophisticated novel follows Nameer, a young Iraqi scholar earning his Ph.D. at Harvard, who is hired by filmmakers to help document the devastation of the 2003 invasion...

Young Jawad, born to a traditional Shi'ite family of corpse washers and shrouders in Baghdad, decides to abandon the family tradition, choosing instead to become a sculptor, to celebrate life rather than tend to death. He enters Baghdad's Academy of...