Frankenstein in Baghdad

'Saadawi leavens his satirical horror with dark humour, stitching his novel together with the same lurching vitality as his title character's monstrous body to vividly evoke his own dismembered country.' * Guardian Books of the Year * '[A] biting satire of Iraqi life and sectarian disputes.' * Financial Times * 'Saadawi's strange, violent and wickedly funny book borrows heavily from the science fiction canon, and pays back the debt with interest: it is a remarkable achievement, and one that, regrettably, is unlikely ever to lose its urgent relevancy.' -- Sarah Perry, author of The Essex Serpent * Guardian * '[Saadawi is] Baghdad's new literary star.' * New York Times * 'Frankenstein in Baghdad is complex but very readable and darkly humorous; it has well-observed characters, whose back stories reflect the wider context. The monster is a metaphor both for the physical horrors of Iraq, and for the development of groups within that chaos. The translation by Jonathan Wright is first-rate.' * Times Literary Supplement * 'Helped by Jonathan Wright's elegant and witty translation, which reaches for and attains bracing pathos, Saadawi's novel mixes a range of characters and their voices to surprising, even jolting effect...a remarkable book.' * Observer * 'A darkly delightful novel... Detective story and satire as well as gothic horror, Frankenstein in Baghdad provides a tragicomic take on a society afflicted by fear, and a parable concerning responsibility and justice.' * New Statesman * 'Ahmed Saadawi has wrenched a fable that puts a cherished Romantic myth to urgent new use... In their bicentenary year, Mary Shelley's scientist and his creature will take plenty of contemporary spins. Surely, no updated journey will be more necessary than Saadawi's... A nightmarish, but horridly hilarious, tale... Sinister, satirical, ferociously comic but oddly moving.' * Spectator * 'Frankenstein in Baghdad is more than just a black comedy. It's as much of a crossbreed as its ghoulish hero - part thriller, part horror, part social commentary... Saadawi, slickly translated by Jonathan Wright, captures the atmosphere of war-torn Baghdad with the swiftest of penstrokes, and picks out details that make the reader feel, and even taste, the aftermath of the explosions that pepper the book.' * Financial Times * 'Saadawi's novel...is more than an extended metaphor for the interminable carnage in Iraq and the precarious nature of its body politic. It also intimately depicts the lives of those affected by the conflict [and] offer[s] a glimpse into the day-to-day experiences of a society fractured by bloodshed.' * Economist * 'In the 200 years since Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, her monster has turned up in countless variations - but few of them have been as wild or politically pointed as the monster in Ahmed Saadawi's Frankenstein in Baghdad.' * New York Times * 'Expertly told... A significant addition to contemporary Arabic fiction.' * Judges' citation, International Prize for Arabic Fiction * 'An extraordinary piece of work. With uncompromising focus, Ahmed Saadawi takes you right to the wounded heart of war's absurd and tragic wreckage. A devastating but essential read.' * Kevin Powers, bestselling author of the National Book Award finalist The Yellow Birds * 'One of the best novels to emerge from the catastrophe of the Iraq War... Extraordinary... Earthy and vibrant... There are striking continuities with the original Shelley novel... Saadawi's monster in Frankenstein in Baghdad is a hybrid creature for our times. It is a desperate marker of the brutal violence that has taken countless lives in the wars unleashed in the region... But Frankenstein in Baghdad is also a sign that the imagination can still survive in these conditions, literary works flowering in the cracks of the rubble.' * Roger Luckhurst, Los Angeles Review of Books * 'Matter-of-factly, Saadawi sets out a reality - Baghdad in 2005 - so gothic in its details...that, when the novel makes

Ahmed Saadawi is an Iraqi novelist, poet, screenwriter and documentary filmmaker. In 2010 he was selected for Beirut39, as one of the thirty-nine best Arab authors under the age of forty, and in 2014 he became the first Iraqi to win the prestigious International Prize for Arabic Fiction. This prize was awarded to Frankenstein in Baghdad, which also won Le Grand Prix de L'Imaginaire in 2017. He lives in Baghdad. Jonathan Wright studied Arabic at Oxford University. He is the translator of Hassan Blasim's The Corpse Exhibition, which won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2014. He lives in London.