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Taking its title from the savvy, street-wise slave girl in A Thousand And One Nights, this debut collection from Mosul-born Anoud, celebrates the strongest of women in the toughest of predicaments. From the heroine of the title story, fighting her way out of forced marriage to the leader of an ISISstyle jihadi army, to the schoolgirl learning how to pick her way through potential car-bombs on her way to school in war-torn Baghdad, to the destitute refugee found in a London cafe raving at a TV screen broadcasting news of Trump's travel ban; these stories run the gamut on the myriad ways war impacts on the lives and freedoms of women.
The real power of these stories – and, by extension, the power of Anoud’s writing – is in seeing how those characters untangle themselves from that unwieldy confluence, maintaining their dignity and steadfastly refusing to be defined by trauma. Delivered in sharp, unflinching prose, yet with a surprising lightness of touch, Anoud has produced ten stories that bear testament to the depths of human resilience. Taking readers on a journey from a devastated post-invasion Baghdad, to cramped New York apartments, to totalitarian visions of the future, Kahramana confirms Anoud’s status as a writer of most expansive horizons and heart-stopping intimacies.
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