‘Erudite and engaging.’—The New Yorker
‘Illuminating.’—Kirkus Reviews
‘A hugely ambitious novel… humane and moving.’—The Asian Review of Books
‘A sweeping, emotionally devastating contemporary epic that feels both intimate and urgent.’—The Bookseller
In the summer of 2014, three long estranged Iraqi-British sisters are pulled back into each other’s orbit by the rediscovery of their late father’s paintings, that were assumed lost when they fled Baghdad. Beautiful, elusive Zainab; embittered, practical Mediha; and headstrong, queer Ishtar each lay claim to their father’s legacy—an artistic and personal inheritance entwined with betrayal, exile, and a homeland they no longer recognize.
As the sisters fight to preserve, erase, or repurpose the past, Zainab’s estranged son Nizar, a war correspondent haunted by trauma and heartbreak, returns to the family fold. With the re-emergence of buried memories comes a reckoning, and the family is forced to confront the personal and political betrayals that tore them apart.
Saleem Haddad’s second novel, after his acclaimed debut One Last Drink at Guapa, spans continents and decades—from 1950s’ Baghdad to contemporary London, from the Tigris River to Yemeni refugee camps. Floodlines is at once an intimate family drama and, in its scope, a modern epic. It is a rare novel that bridges the historic and the immediate and is a heartfelt meditation on what it means to belong, to create, to endure.
