“An intimate, intricate portrait of how people’s lives are jostled and remade... an engrossing read.”
—Washington Independent Review of Books

“This intergenerational drama is deftly written with graceful prose and psycho-logical acuity... Loudon pens the history of Western involvement in Iraq, dating back to the 1930s, with stunning acumen and imagination.”
—The New Arab

“[A] sweeping debut novel... a meditation on the impact of colonialism.”
—Daily Hampshire Gazette

★The book won the Best Foreign Fiction award at the Sharjah book fair, the Stroud Book Festival Fiction Competition, and was longlisted for the Bridport Novel Award.
★Compelling, often tense cross-cultural family drama that unfolds across England and Iraq over the course of several decades.
★Accessible writing, plot-driven narrative.
★Multi-generational stories that follow changing relationships between parents and children.
★Modern historical fiction, especially fiction relating to World War Twoand the period immediately following. Sheds light on the vanished urban world of twentieth-century Baghdad (1938-1970s) before the Iraq War, subsequent Gulf Wars, and US invasion.
★Explores issues that are specific to women: the consequences of an impulsive young marriage, tensions between sisters, miscarriages, a daughter’s frustrated efforts to live up to the expectations of an idealized father.

One night in 2003, Anglo-Iraqi psychiatrist Mona Haddad has a surprise visitor to her London office, an old acquaintance Duncan Claybourne. But why has he come? Will his confession finally lay bare what happened to her family before they escaped Iraq?

Their stories begin in 1938, when Mona’s mother Diane, an Englishwoman newly married to Ibrahim, an Iraqi doctor, meets Duncan by chance. Diane is working as a nanny for the Iraqi royal family. Duncan is a young British Embassy officer in Baghdad. When the king dies in a mysterious accident, Ibrahim and his family suspect Diane of colluding with Duncan and the British.

Summoning up the vanished world of mid-twentieth-century Baghdad, this story of one family calls into British attitudes and policies in Iraq and offers up a penetrating reflection on cross-cultural marriage and the lives of women caught between different worlds.

Elizabeth Loudon is a writer, teacher, and former charity development consultant. She has an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and an MA in English from Cambridge University, and has taught at Smith, Amherst, and Williams Colleges.
She’s published fiction and memoir in the Denver Quarterly, INTRO, North American Review, and Gettysburg Review, among others, and has received a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship. A Stranger in Baghdad is her first novel. She lives in London.