Floodlines

by Saleem Haddad

Set between London and Baghdad, Saleem Haddad’s brilliant second novel is a sweeping, multigenerational tale of art, exile, memory, and the enduring legacies of war.

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 long-lost paintings. 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 reemergence of buried memories comes a reckoning, and the family is forced to confront the personal and political betrayals that tore them apart.

Spanning 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 a heartfelt meditation on what it means to belong, to create, to endure.

Genres: Fiction, Queer, Middle East, Literary Fiction, Family, Summer, Historical Fiction

336 pages, Paperback

First published February 12, 2026

About the author

Saleem Haddad was born in Kuwait City to an Iraqi-German mother and a Palestinian-Lebanese father.

His first novel, Guapa, was published in 2016, receiving critical acclaim from The New Yorker, The Guardian, and others, and was awarded both a Stonewall Honour and the 2017 Polari First Book Prize.

He has also published a number of short stories, including for the Palestinian sci-fi anthology Palestine +100. He also writes for film and television; his directorial debut, Marco, premiered in March 2019 and was nominated for the 2019 Iris Prize for ‘Best British Short Film’. His work has been supported by institutions such as Yaddo and the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin.

He is currently based in Lisbon, with roots in London, Amman, and Beirut

Reviews

[Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

Powerful novel that follows an Iraqi family across generations. I appreciated that Saleen Haddad wrote about the conflict that can come between three siblings and how that personal conflict can coincide with differences in political ideologies/worldviews. Floodlines as a whole does a nice job addressing the intersection of art, neocolonialism, and resistance.

The main reason this book gets a slightly lower rating for me is that I felt that by the middle of the book, the political messages took precedent over the character voice/dialogue/development. The political messages are super important, though to me it seemed that some of the tightness of the prose, especially when it came to the characters’ interactions with one another and within themselves, dissipated. Would still recommend though especially for folks who may not mind a more discursive writing style!

[Pedro Marques · Rating 5 out of 5]

Floodlines completely fascinated me. This was my first experience reading Saleem Haddad, but it will certainly not be my last. This is an easy five-star read and, in my view, a novel everyone should read, especially given our current geopolitical moment and the fractures shaping our world today.

Floodlines is a multigenerational family and historical drama that truly feels epic. Spanning continents and decades, it is inspired by Salim Haddad’s great-uncle, the Iraqi modernist painter Jewad Selim, and carries the weight of both personal and national history on every page.

At its centre are three estranged sisters, Zainab, Ishtar, and Mediha, forced to confront their father’s legacy, once one of Iraq’s most celebrated artists, and the buried secrets entwined with his work. Through them, each character is compelled to face their own story as it is engraved into the fractured history of their homeland.

This novel grapples with loss, displacement, family, art, and the deep wounds of neocolonialism. It asks how individual and collective identities are shaped by memory and heritage, and how we live in the tension between preserving the past and carrying hope for the future. How do you bear the weight of history when the past itself is broken?

Through each character, we follow the history of Iraq, its culture, its soul, its grief, its fragmentation, and its enduring spirit.

Art and cultural inheritance sit at the heart of this novel. As Haddad himself describes it, this is about “the role of art in times of rupture.”

Zainab’s son, Nizar, a war correspondent haunted by both past and present, becomes a powerful lens through which the novel examines trauma, queerness, longing, and the burden of family legacy. Throughout, the story holds a constant tension: tradition versus future, history versus modernity, resistance versus hope.

The dialogue is sharp, charged, and deeply moving. And beneath it all runs a haunting question: at what cost do we fight for home and legacy when they have been blown apart by those in power? Do we truly own our home?

This book taught me so much. It sent me down paths of research into Iraq’s history and geography, and the author’s years of work and research are felt on every page.

James Baldwin’s words, used as the epigraph, perfectly capture the soul of this novel:
“People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.”

[Sofie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A multi-generational novel, Floodlines mainly focuses on the turbulent relationship between three Iraqi-British sisters (Ishtar, Zainab, and Mediha) as they navigate displacement, war, violence, love, family secrets, and more throughout their lives.

This is one the best books I’ve ever read! It is so beautifully written and powerfully haunting in its descriptions. The book opens with the perspective of Nizar, the son of Zainab. He is a war journalist living in London, but has recently started doing sex work. Through his pov, we come to understand how his past and his identity have shaped his relationships. A lot of his pov is him reflecting on his past relationship with a man named Alfie. These moments were really heartbreaking to read, evident through Nizar’s own fervent heartbreak.

Throughout the book we also get Zainab’s and Ishtar’s perspectives, as well as their mother’s, Bridget’s. In all these povs, we come to understand the family better and how each perspective tells the same story but with different perceptions and feelings. I thought this was so well done and I was really invested in each character’s thoughts and memories. I also loved the descriptions of Baghdad. So many of the character’s thoughts are them reflecting on how they remember Baghdad; the streets they walked, the places they lived, the jobs they went to. Later, they reflect on its many changes, both known and unknown; how wars, foreign intervention, and colonialism have changed the landscapes of not just Baghdad, but Iraq as a whole. The perfect way to describe this novel would be “nostalgia.” And while the characters are nostalgic of the past, they are also running away from it.

In general, I loved the story, and I loved the characters, even though they could be frustrating at times (one in particular made me angry). Haddad did an amazing job at representing both the good and bad parts of them. These characters are not perfect; they have made mistakes and hurt others. Life is complex and people contain multitudes and I love when books tackle that unflinchingly, which is what Floodlines does.

This is truly a wonderful book and I’m so grateful to have gotten an ARC for it (thank you Europa Press and Netgalley)! Floodlines releases February 12! 🩷

[Louise · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really loved this multi-generational family drama based around 3 sisters & their extended family of artists from Iraq. Dealing with loss, exile, displacement, memory, hope and sisterly drama.

The inheritance of their late fathers paintings brings up long buried secrets and traumas that can't be ignored. I liked seeing the history of Iraq through a family perspective; the estranged sisters have to deal with their shattered links to each other and to their country, both transformed by tragedy.

The weight of history and the transformation of memories is heavy but the hope for something else glimmers. We can only live so long in stasis before we have to flow on. Art and the river will show us the way; the path of the future threads away before us, full of hope even with the inevitable uncertainty of its future flooding.

I really enjoyed this exceptional novel, the voices are beautiful, authentic, moving and extremely hopeful. Now need to read his other novel.

Thanks to netgalley and the publisher for an e-arc for my honest review.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Floodlines is an entrancing mix of family secrets, tensions between sisters, art, war, displacement, and love set in a land I have never visited but that i feel I know. Exiles looking for home and looking for hope and putting themselves back together on that dirty ancient river. I found myself procrastinating finishing the book because I didn't want it to end... the final journey was worth the wait.

[Ayicia Naomi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was devastating in so many different ways. I loved all of the characters and the messy fun sad family dynamics. Reallly really good scene setting with descriptions of the Tigris River and returning to a place after you’ve been away for a long time. Broke my heart over and over again!!!!

[Alesa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a fascinating novel for many reasons. It deals with modern Iraq, bi-cultural families, queerness, interfamily dynamics, and the importance of art in the Arab world.

At first I was tempted to put the book down, since the vicious arguments between three sisters were disturbingly real (and very depressing). Also, the author writes without telling us who is speaking, which can get pretty confusing. With four main female characters, it takes some effort to figure out the dialogue. I'm not sure why the author chose to punctuate this way, but I wish he hadn't.

Which brings us to the topic of a man writing from four female viewpoints (plus one male viewpoint). I didn't realize the author was a gay man until after finishing the book. That explained why a few of the females' issues felt just a bit off to me (for example, the lifelong trauma of a miscarriage, when numerous healthy children came afterwards). But for the most part, he got inter-sister rivalry right.

A lot of the book is about the importance of art. All of the main characters are artists, some very famous and some not. The deceased father of the family was one of Iraq's most prominent artists. In the afterward, we learn that he was a real person, as was his wife, and the novel is loosely based on his life and family. Not being all that knowledgeable about art myself, a lot of the artsy discussions went over my head. But the parts about the intersections of colonial and Middle East art were fascinating.

The discussions about the Iraqi diaspora were wonderful. I really enjoyed learning about the longing for a homeland that no longer exists, how emigres feel displaced their entire lives, and how this defines their personalities. The characters ended up living in many different countries, over many periods of turmoil in the Arab world, and all of this rang true.

Some the secrets/reveals felt a bit stretched to me. But it all came together nicely in the end. I enjoyed one character becoming obsessed with the myth of Gilgamesh and wanting to float an old-style ark down the Tigris River. I wasn't sure about the details of all this (boating in Iraq while ISIS is on the rampage, for instance), but it was interesting to say the least.

The author really poured his heart and soul into this book, which I admire. I learned so much. It wasn't always easy reading, jumping around frequently between voices, and participating in witnessing deep family arguments. But once hooked, I couldn't put it down.

The writing is elegant:

"It is difficult to love an artist. They are selfish creatures. An artist might lie, cheat, and steal with the belief they are creating something more important than a single life. To love an artist, you must have an even stronger belief in the power of art. An artist's lover lives with the heat and smoke of the fire, but the light falls elsewhere."

Thanks the NetGalley and the publisher for an advance review copy.

[Snehil · Rating 5 out of 5]

When we think of displacement-the one often forced by a bald eagle flying over a resourceful land and people, ready to democratise the air, the land, the water, everything in sight-we tend to think of physical relocation. But as the characters in Floodlines know, you can never fully relocate; the place you grow up in holds you in a tight grip (or embrace), and you-following Newton’s third law-also hold it in your hearts and minds, refusing to let it sneak away. And God forbid, if you are an artist, your longing can torment you in even more myriad ways, by making your hopeful brushstrokes full of cynical breaks and pauses; the chokehold of the memories expands to every aspect of your life.

We follow the Mathloum family-parents Bridget and Haydar, and their daughters (Ishtar, Zainab, Mediha), and Zainab’s son Nizar. All of them are experiencing three time periods at the same time: the heavy winds of the past, the burden of responsibility in the present, and the concern about the future, making a three-dimensional prison around them. Saleem Haddad beautifully shows what effects such triple anxiety can have on people, especially when every generation is not only dealing with it, trying to break free from it, but oftentimes passing on a multiplied sense of captivity. The characters try to stand firm on the ground, not willing to let the global, imperial challenges shake them, even though the ground under them doesn’t just move; it is violently bombed, mercilessly altered to become unrecognisable. This kind of bombardment can be disorienting; the characters often forget who they are, where they belong, and that is when art provides them with that ability to return home. It allows them to accept, process, and understand the imperfections in their decisions all along, and make peace with the fact that the past can’t be restored to the perfection of the memories they hold. And it also enables them to see each other-their fellow family members-as people who didn’t have a ready-made template to help them deal with the beast of forced displacement, and every new attempt to break free of this generational turbulence will be full of mistakes-unforgivable, but understandable.

Stunning work by Saleem Haddad!

[Susan L · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved really everything about this book although the chapter told from the dying elderly mother’s (Bridget) point of view really sticks with me. Her perspective shows up at a time in the story when you don’t think about her except from the point of view of her three daughter’s own perspectives about the burden of caring for her and their own tortured pasts. It’s in the middle of the book.

Up until this one chapter, the sister’s stories as well as the stories told by Nizar, Bridget’s only grandson are compelling and modern, mixed into livelihoods / lives pursued in the Middle East and London. The sisters are artists descended from an Iraqi father and British mother who rose to prominence as famous artists themselves but whose legacy has been muted by history; Nizar is a war journalist despondent over what’s he’s seen and how it has no place or existence in his city life. There are many complicated threads and all are interesting.

The novel reveals world and family histories in the midst of a war zone and is unfathomable. Our government drops the bombs that ultimately destroy the lives of the inhabitants. When and how will we pay for these crimes?

[Zuzanna Skolimowska · Rating 5 out of 5]

so profound and well thought out

[Alexa · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 rounded up

[Helene Black · Rating 4 out of 5]

Floodlines is a multi-generational novel set predominantly in 2014. The blurb doesn’t do this novel justice as the story is much more complex than the blurb suggests. It deals with heavy subjects, including the effects of trauma and loss on family dynamics. The pacing in the middle was a bit slow in my opinion (which is why I have deducted a star), but I read this novel in the course of several weeks as my commuting book, and I never not felt like picking it up.

[Anna Baird-Hassell · Rating 5 out of 5]

really enjoyed the act of reading this book. I love a family of interesting characters and I love a book that tickles my sociology brain

[dee (zuko’s girlfriend) · Rating 4 out of 5]

The journey through the lanes of old Baghdad coinciding with the current chaos, shaping hallucinations and grief was beautifully depicted in the book. I think this book touches the core of being alive. Seen from the lens of an artist, Haddad is very efficient about the way he makes the character very realistic and trying to escape the cage of suffering.

The historical relevances are on point, and you see the dark face of colonialism, capitalism and communism altogether. The best part is author’s inspiration from a real-life artist and his self immersion, which gives an insight to the complex mind of the inhabitant of the world defined with the term “diaspora”. I loved the epiphanies, the regrets, and the schizophrenic flashbacks which gave the work its true artistic nature.

[Demetri · Rating 5 out of 5]

An Ark Made of Paintings and Mud: Why “Floodlines” Turns the Tigris Into a Family, a Battlefield, and a Blueprint for Hope
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | February 5th, 2026


Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
A dusk-lit Tigris-bank crowd watches Ishtar deliver her launch speech in “Floodlines,” unveiling the makeshift “ark” – a flotilla/sail hung with the family’s recovered paintings – as Baghdad’s water becomes both stage and archive.

In “Floodlines,” Saleem Haddad sends a family down a river that refuses to stay a metaphor. The Tigris is water and waste, memory and muscle; it is a corridor of myth and a ledger of modern policy. It is also, in Haddad’s hands, a testing ground for an old question that has recently become unavoidably contemporary: when the past is a wound and the future is a forecast, what, exactly, is hope supposed to do?

The novel’s engine is a piece of art that wants to be a vessel. Ishtar, an Iraqi artist based in London, returns to the region in 2014 to build an ark-like structure from three traditional Mesopotamian boats – the round guffa, the reed-and-tire kalak, and the narrow meshouf. Her plan is part homage, part provocation: to stitch together craft traditions that colonial borders and modern war have pulled apart, then sail south as if the river might still function as a shared artery rather than a sequence of checkpoints and polluted bends. The journey begins in the north, near Hasankeyf, where the threat of inundation hovers like a curse, and she recruits a small, unlikely crew: Murat, a boatman whose village is itself facing erasure; Nizar, her nephew, whose intelligence and impatience make him both collaborator and irritant; and, later, Abu Rashid, a marsh man whose presence carries the authority of a lived ecology.

Haddad structures “Floodlines” like a braided current. Chapters move between named perspectives – Ishtar, her sister Zainab, their mother Bridget, and other figures orbiting the family – and between temporal strata that arrive the way memories do: not as orderly exposition, but as a flood triggered by smell, texture, a street corner, a sentence you have been avoiding. The narrative toggles from the riverbank to a rainy Scottish cottage, from Dubai’s engineered gleam to Baghdad’s checkpoint labyrinth, and back again, until the reader begins to feel the book’s central argument in the body: that displacement is not a one-time event but a permanent weather system.

Zainab’s strand begins far from the river. She has built a life in the Gulf selling polished “heritage” objects – trinkets of Iraqi-ness that can be bought, worn, and displayed without touching the mud that produced them. Her estrangement has been lucrative, which is its own kind of shame. When she travels to Scotland to confront Mediha, the sister who stayed closer to the raw ore of their family history, the trip carries the nervous energy of a heist. Bridget is declining; her memory is unreliable; the house is a museum of domestic disrepair – medication schedules, spoiled food, odd hoards, an air of damp grief. Zainab intends to retrieve the family’s paintings, which Mediha has been guarding like contraband. She also intends, less cleanly, to retrieve a version of herself that does not feel like an accessory to other people’s fantasies.

Meanwhile Ishtar’s expedition, set in October 2014, is a logistical fever dream. Boats break. Tires puncture. Goat skins rot. Funding evaporates. The river itself is a series of armed negotiations: checkpoints with their own ecosystems, slogans painted onto barriers, men in civilian cars carrying rifles, children and older women approaching vehicles to beg. Baghdad, when Ishtar arrives, is at once recognizable and unrecognizable. She books a luxury hotel that feels like a fortress and then walks out into streets where the old coordinates – home, school, bridge, market – have been rewritten by invasion, sanctions, sectarian violence, and the anxious improvisations of survival. In one of the novel’s most devastating sequences, she searches for her family home and finds absence where a room used to be, the psychic equivalent of stepping into thin air.

It is in these sequences that Haddad shows his gift for rendering a city as a palimpsest. He is attentive to the way aesthetics persist even in militarized ruin – painted doves on concrete, neon signage, the insistence of art seeping into the most mundane structures of control. He knows how to make the sensory do intellectual work. Petrol and sewage mingle with the smell of wet earth; a childhood memory arrives not as nostalgia but as survival technique. Even the gaudiness of the hotel lobby becomes part of the book’s moral inventory: who gets to be insulated, who pays for the insulation, and what insulation does to the soul.

If Ishtar supplies the novel’s heat, Nizar supplies its pressure. Queer, hyperliterate, sharpened by a different generation of exile, he is wary of the way “telling stories” can become another form of taking. He begins as the dutiful witness, the one who can turn fragments into narrative and narrative into meaning. Then Haddad reveals the quieter violence inside that role: the temptation to use other people’s pain as fuel, the hunger for a coherent explanation that would make betrayal legible. Nizar’s needling questions land like stones thrown into water you thought you knew. He can see, sometimes more clearly than Ishtar can, that art-making in a disaster zone can flirt with the very extraction it claims to resist.


Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
In a rain-slick Baghdad street under the glowing “Nineveh Kebab” sign, Ishtar—wrapped in an abaya and makeshift hijab—buys a single rose and pauses in disoriented grief as she realizes her childhood neighborhood’s anchor has shifted and her family home has been demolished.

The river journey intensifies this logic. As the expedition moves south, the waters slow and thicken. Debris gathers. Pollution becomes intimate: brackish taste on the tongue, algae film, sickness that arrives as cramps and fever. Haddad’s environmental consciousness is not decorative; it is narrative propulsion. He is acutely attentive to how ecological breakdown and infrastructural collapse become daily tasks – finding clean water, negotiating a barrage, washing clothes without poisoning your skin. The novel treats water not as a scenic element but as a moral material. Every gulp and rinse becomes a question: who controls the flow, who gets clean, who is forced to ingest history in its most literal form?

Myth, here, is not ornamentation. “The Epic of Gilgamesh” threads through the novel as both mirror and argument, a refrain that insists the present is not new, only newly arranged. Haddad uses the epic the way some writers use music: to establish rhythm, to thicken meaning, to remind the reader that the questions modernity treats as novel – what lasts, what is lost, what a person can build against death – were asked first in a place that contemporary geopolitics has tried to turn into a cautionary tale. The ark Ishtar imagines is not only biblical; it is Mesopotamian, older than the borders that later tried to freeze the region into manageable shapes. In Haddad’s telling, myth is less escape than pressure test: can the old stories still hold the weight of the new damage?

The novel’s most audacious convergence comes when the private plot and the public project finally meet. Zainab brings Bridget and the paintings to Baghdad. The family constructs an ark-like artwork: boats arranged into a circular bloom, canvases pinned to cloth like sails, the river itself conscripted as gallery space. They stage an event that is part exhibition, part ritual, part protest, part family séance. It is the sort of set piece that could easily topple into symbolism, and Haddad keeps it human by letting the scene remain messy: people arguing about logistics, about safety, about who is allowed to speak; strangers arriving with their own grief; siblings fighting in the corners while the city watches, curious and suspicious and hungry for something that is not a headline.

Bridget’s emergence at the Baghdad launch is staged with a novelist’s sense of crowd physics. Haddad lets the old binaries – public and private, art and survival – collapse in real time as this aging painter, widowed and half-feral with grief, steps into a microphone and becomes something like a conduit for the city’s long conversation with itself. She speaks in the language she has avoided for decades, corrects a name that has been cynically altered, insists that any light worth making casts a shadow, and refuses the audience’s desire for a clean redemption narrative. For a moment, the book turns into a portrait of what it means to age inside history: to have your memory betray you, and to speak anyway; to have your body fail, and to offer the body as witness.

It is also here that Haddad’s writing most clearly bears his signature, the blend of confession and critique that readers of his earlier novel “Guapa” will recognize. He is a novelist who thinks in the open. At its best, the effect is exhilarating: the mind and the body in the same room, the essay and the scene interleaving like reeds. At its weakest, the open thinking can tilt into the declarative, paragraphs that feel like beautifully composed position statements. The novel occasionally strains to name every implication of its own imagery, as if afraid the reader might miss the stakes. But “Floodlines” is also, on some level, a book about refusing euphemism. Its impatience with soft language is part of its moral posture.

The family story is equally unwilling to soften. Haddad is sharp on the way families distribute roles as survival governance. One sister becomes the responsible one, another the creative one, another the difficult one; a mother becomes both refuge and engine of harm; silence becomes domestic policy, enforced for the supposed sake of keeping everyone alive. When that silence breaks, the novel handles trauma with notable care. It does not sensationalize violation; it traces its echoing consequences: modesty that is not prudishness but negotiated ceasefire with the body, dread of being seen, the way an entire household can collude in quiet because speech would fracture the fragile scaffolding of daily life. The book insists that what happens in a country happens in a kitchen, and vice versa.

As the expedition continues, the book deepens into travelogue and reckoning. The crew camps in bomb craters and discovers tank tracks in mud; they wash themselves in water they do not trust. They pass villages where hospitality survives as insistence, where strangers bring tea and stew because movement itself has become a luxury. The novel lingers on encounters that feel like micro-ethics: a Sabaean-Mandaean temple where water is central to ritual and exile is mapped onto the availability of clean shallows; arguments about whether rebuilding is duty or denial; moments of levity that do not cancel grief but keep it from becoming total. The river becomes a moving committee meeting in which everyone is negotiating what it means to stay, to leave, to return, to claim.


Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
Ishtar stands on the Babylon Hotel balcony in Baghdad, watching the grey Tigris and the lit “Floating Restaurant” drift below – a hushed first reckoning with her return and the river journey she’s about to attempt.

What makes “Floodlines” feel urgent now is not only its portrait of Iraq, though that portrait is devastating and specific. It is the novel’s insistence that the crises we label separately – climate catastrophe, imperial violence, diaspora, cultural heritage loss, the politics of memorialization – are in fact one braided system. A river is a supply line, a border, a myth, a dumping ground, a childhood memory, a route of escape, a site of prayer. Read the book alongside the ongoing news of water scarcity, contested borders, displaced populations, and the long afterlife of foreign interventions, and its central image sharpens: the river is a record of what power does, and a reminder that the consequences flow downhill.

Haddad is attentive, too, to the way catastrophe edits culture. The novel keeps returning to the question of museums: what do you archive when the destruction is ongoing, when the ruins are not past but present tense? “Floodlines” answers by treating art as a portable institution – a tarp strung like a sail, paintings fastened to cloth, a river turned into procession. He also has a satirist’s ear for official language: the way “concern” and “international community” can become floating sentence fragments.

Haddad’s closest literary kin are writers who understand that history is not background but weather – Ahmed Saadawi’s “Frankenstein in Baghdad,” Sinan Antoon’s “The Baghdad Eucharist,” and Hisham Matar’s “The Return.” Like those books, “Floodlines” is less interested in tidy plot than in the lived texture of aftermath: how a person carries a country inside the body.

The question, then, is whether “Floodlines” earns its metaphors. Does the ark hold? Does the river carry more than it can bear? In the end, Haddad’s triumph is not that he resolves the family’s fractures, but that he refuses to let any one framework swallow the others. The ecological narrative does not absolve the personal. The personal does not shrink the political. The myth does not anesthetize the material. The material – brackish water, petrol-soaked air, mud that smells like childhood, the exhausted logistics of moving through a place that has been repeatedly invaded by both armies and ideologies – keeps insisting on itself, and the book keeps honoring that insistence.

There are places where the ambition strains its vessel. Some secondary figures appear primarily to represent positions in a debate, then fade. The intelligence is so close to the surface that mystery sometimes thins; you can feel the author assembling his evidence. But even that evidence-making has its own beauty. Haddad writes with a lyric insistence that turns inventory into music, and he trusts the reader to sit inside contradiction: nostalgia that is both comfort and lie; “heritage” that is both preservation and packaging; return that is both healing and reopening.

In the closing movement, as the expedition reaches Qurna, the point where the rivers meet after their long estrangement, the book finds a hard-earned tenderness. There is no perfect restoration, no return to an unbroken home. There is only provisional coherence – bodies rowing in rhythm, strangers offering food, a mother briefly oriented by return, sisters sitting together as the sky changes color. The novel treats these moments not as consolation prizes but as the actual substance of a life. The grand narratives – nation, progress, exile, redemption – fall away, and what remains is a quieter claim: that continuity is something you build in fragments, and that fragments can still be enough to keep you afloat.

For a book so saturated with loss, “Floodlines” is surprisingly generous. It asks its characters, and its readers, for something harder than outrage: compassionate precision. Not the forgiveness that erases wrongdoing, but the understanding that allows a person to see how damage reproduces itself – and how it might, with effort, be interrupted. It is why, despite the occasional overexplanatory passage, I’d rate the novel 91 out of 100: not for offering easy hope, but for showing hope as a radical discipline practiced in full view of the flood.

[Laurel · Rating 4 out of 5]

One thing about me is I’m always going to enjoy a multigenerational family epic traveling through time and across different cities. This was no different — a really lovely novel that taught me quite a lot about Iraq and its history and culture (which was a blind spot for me before reading), with a whole host of lovable characters who make mistakes and have to deal with how they have hurt each other. Ishtar’s art project provided a great way to connect everyone back to their homeland at the end which gave nice closure despite it not being a happy ending necessarily, while Zainab and Mediha’s relationship with themselves, their mother, and each other provided interpersonal emotional depth to complement the major macro-issues the book deals with. I wanted to love Nizar, and his story was certainly powerful as he grappled with privilege and safety after he had seen such suffering and destruction, but he just felt sort of on the outside and not fully fleshed out to me. I would certainly recommend this book though, I think it was a compelling read and feels quite timely now as we watch conflict persist in the region despite knowing the innumerable consequences that come from it. I think something the author manages to capture here is that there is a semblance of beauty and hope in all situations, and art can be made under even the most painful of circumstances.

[Patricia · Rating 5 out of 5]

A multigenerational novel about three Iraqi-British sisters reconnecting after their father’s death, as they confront family tensions and the legacy of exile and war. The story shifts between the parents’ past, the sisters’ lives, and different moments in Nizar’s (the son’s) life. Everything is cleverly intertwined.
It took me a bit to get into it, but once I focused, I couldn’t stop. The writing is cinematic and poetic; it’s clear it’s the product of thorough research, but above all, it’s incredibly enjoyable and hard to put down. I savored every last bit of it.
Thank you NetGalley and Europa Editions for the advanced copy. Saleem is an amazing writer. I will be thinking about this novel for a long time.

[Sharon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Solid and brilliantly written.
The many elements - foreign culture, art, LGBTQ, dysfunctional family, sexual abuse, suicide, war - were blended so smoothly into the story that it flowed like the rivers that held a prominent place in the book.
My only negative (and this is on me) was that I had a hard time with the Iranian names. Not being familiar with such names it took me a bit to sort out who was who and if they were male or female. It distracted me at the beginning of the book.

[Trey Minter · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 Stars: The first 75 pages of this book had me thinking we were in store for one of my top 5 books of all time. The writing is so beautiful and so emotional. I haven’t read a family has real and visceral since Zadie Smith’s On Beauty. I think the momentum slowed for me after the first 100 pages, but it’s still a brilliant work

[María SA · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5
El trasfondo histórico, las temáticas y las personalidades de los personajes darían para buenas discusiones en un club de lectura. La forma, muchas veces, me ha parecido forzada en exceso.

[Madeleine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best fiction I have read in a long time, loved it

[Matt Glassett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bold timely touching and a little bitchy I loved it!!!!

[Annukka · Rating 5 out of 5]

wow what a beautiful book.
it’s such a rare chance to get to read a book that manages to handle so many important subjects while staying true to the story and the timeline.
i also love a book that simultaneously can teach me but also give me comfort and that i can relate to.
i’m so glad i impulsively bought this book!! lmao

[Kathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

second novel confirms saleem haddad as one of my favourite authors - if you don't know, get to know

[Mali Clark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Floodlines is an emotional and layered exploration of the personal, psychological, and familial aftershocks of colonialism, war, and exile. Through the lives of three estranged sisters, Ishtar, Zainab, and Mediha, alongside their mother Bridget and Zainab’s son Nizar, the novel traces how the past seeps into present day relationships and identity as the family grapples with the enduring weight of their father’s legacy.

What initially appear to be political archetypes quickly unfold into deeply human figures. Each character is written with striking nuance, shaped as much by private intimacies and silences as by the historical and political forces surrounding them.

I found the novel both educational and deeply moving. It repeatedly sent me down research rabbit holes into its historical and political contexts. Thoughtful, intimate, and politically resonant, Floodlines feels especially urgent in the current geopolitical climate: a quiet but powerful reminder of how historical forces continue to structure personal lives in the present.

James Baldwin’s quote, “People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them,” has never been quite so relevant.

[Kamiiinkonpaper · Rating 5 out of 5]

Floodlines is exceptional at what it sets out to do. At first, I had the uneasy sense that the novel was attempting to hold too many themes at once. That impression doesn’t last long. As the narrative develops, the novel’s structure reveals itself as careful rather than crowded, with each theme reinforcing the others instead of competing for attention.

What I loved most was the novel’s treatment of time. Some pages blur the present with the past, memory with conversation, and reality with voices that are no longer physically there. Bridget’s old age and the gradual erosion of her memories create a deeply affecting portrayal of what it means to age, to lose not only people but also one’s grip on linear time itself. Time in Floodlines is not stable or orderly. It folds in on itself, just as it does in memory and grief.

Saleem Haddad writes characters who are charismatic, forceful, and emotionally charged, yet never feel artificial. Even at their most intense, they remain grounded and recognizably human. Their contradictions are allowed to exist without explanation or apology, which only makes them feel more authentic.

The Epic of Gilgamesh plays a key role in the novel, acting as both a thematic anchor and a quiet echo running beneath the narrative. I strongly recommend reading it either before or after Floodlines, as it adds another layer of resonance, particularly around loss, legacy, and the human desire to outlast time.

Overall, Floodlines showcases some of the strongest writing I’ve read in a long time. It balances an impressive range of themes, family, heritage, queerness, memory, and politics, without ever feeling scattered. Instead, it feels purposeful, controlled, and deeply confident in its own complexity.

[Mandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Floodlines is an ambitious multigenerational saga that blends intimate family drama with the devastating political and cultural history of Iraq and the broader Middle East. Set primarily between London and Baghdad, the novel begins in the summer of 2014 with the rediscovery of a cache of lost paintings by the late patriarch of an Iraqi-British family—a discovery that draws three estranged sisters back into one another’s orbit and forces them to confront the legacies of war, exile, and personal betrayal that have shaped their lives. The narrative spans decades and countries, moving from Baghdad of the 1950s to the present where memory, trauma, and diaspora shape every choice. This structure allows the novel to function on multiple levels: as an epic family tale, a meditation on artistic inheritance, and a critique of the long aftermath of colonialism and warfare. It’s a powerful and emotionally rich novel about family, memory, and the lasting effects of exile. Overall it drew me in with its complex and nuanced characters, although I felt it was let down by the dialogue which often felt stilted. However, a good read and a relevant one in today’s fractured world.

[Iayat Riaz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Floodlines is an extraordinary novel about memory, identity, and the ways history lives inside families.

Haddad weaves together art, cultural and historical memory, anti-imperial politics, and queer, multi-generational identity in a way that feels both intimate and expansive. The novel moves through personal and collective histories with incredible care, showing how place, diaspora, and family stories shape who we become.

What I loved most is how the book treats art and storytelling as forms of resistance and remembrance. It’s thoughtful, politically aware without feeling heavy-handed, and deeply human.

If you're interested in Iraqi culture, questions of identity and belonging, and novels that explore history through family and art, I can’t recommend this enough.

[Olle Söder · Rating 4 out of 5]

Much awaited after the brilliance of Guapa, Floodlines delivers a fantastic cast of characters and a thoughtful, interconnected portrait of a family shaped and scattered by wars. Haddad’s emotional precision and sense of place remain striking throughout. I found myself wishing to hear more from Nizar, whose perspective felt especially compelling. In the end, I caught myself wishing this might have been the first part of a longer story - simply because I wasn’t ready to leave its characters behind.

[JXR · Rating 5 out of 5]

lyrical, interesting work of literary fiction with some good plotting and good characters. the trio of sisters and one's son are all really interesting POVs and it was great to review. 5 stars. tysm for the arc.

If you want to get honest reviews of some of the most exciting books coming out every week from a top-5 Goodreads Reviewer, sign up for my mailing list here!