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Floodlines: The new novel from the author of Guapa
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.
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.
327 pages, Kindle Edition
First published February 12, 2026
44 people are currently reading
981 people want to read
About the author
Saleem Haddad
8 books291 followersSaleem 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
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
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Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
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! 🩷
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! 🩷
February 5, 2026
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.
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.
December 3, 2025
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.
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.
January 4, 2026
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.
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.
February 8, 2026
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.”
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.”
Review of advance copy
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.
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.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
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.
February 25, 2026
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 instructive 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.
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 instructive 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.
February 23, 2026
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.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
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.
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Read
January 30, 2026Amazing. Full video review coming soon.
Want to read
February 21, 2026Video review by Eric Karl Andersonand book recommendations by the author. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fs8bBP3...
March 1, 2026
A really, really engaging exploration of art and legacy and inheritance with a multi-generational family drama at its center. More thoughts to come.
March 3, 2026
Breathtaking. Will be one of those novels that will sit with me for a long time afterwards.
February 1, 2026
Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with an ARC of this book!
I thoroughly enjoyed this family saga, told through the perspectives of multiple family members. I remember when Guapa came out—it took me ages to find a copy, and when I finally read it, I didn’t really like it. I’m happy to say that this changed with Floodlines. I was genuinely interested in seeing how the family relationships would develop and what the book would ultimately amount to. There was a great deal of trauma to unpack and many unresolved issues to mull over.
I particularly appreciated the final part of the book, where we get a first-person narrative from everyone. I didn’t necessarily like it, but I did appreciate it. My only negative remark is that the character of the son/nephew/grandson (is it obvious I can’t remember his name off the top of my head?) wasn’t featured more prominently, as his story interested me the most.
All in all, I wholeheartedly recommend this book.
“Home is where all our attempts to escape cease.”
I thoroughly enjoyed this family saga, told through the perspectives of multiple family members. I remember when Guapa came out—it took me ages to find a copy, and when I finally read it, I didn’t really like it. I’m happy to say that this changed with Floodlines. I was genuinely interested in seeing how the family relationships would develop and what the book would ultimately amount to. There was a great deal of trauma to unpack and many unresolved issues to mull over.
I particularly appreciated the final part of the book, where we get a first-person narrative from everyone. I didn’t necessarily like it, but I did appreciate it. My only negative remark is that the character of the son/nephew/grandson (is it obvious I can’t remember his name off the top of my head?) wasn’t featured more prominently, as his story interested me the most.
All in all, I wholeheartedly recommend this book.
“Home is where all our attempts to escape cease.”
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Amazing. Full video review coming soon.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Thanks to NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for a review.
Like Mesopotamia in between two flowing rivers, Floodlines tells one Iraqi family’s story between the UK and Iraq over decades. The narration shifts focus from one family member to another, tracing each one’s meandering currents back and forth across various countries, from Iraq, Kuwait, the UK, the UAE, Egypt, or Yemen. The plot revolves around how the characters—three sisters, Ishtar, Zainab, and Mediha, their mother, Bridget, and Nizar, Zainab’s son—both seek to avoid, to embrace, re-piece and make sense of both their family past and legacy and that of the violence committed against their home. In one way or another, all of the character’s are searching for ways to articulate and work through these questions through different discourses of collective political violence and individual trauma and different forms of expression (art, journalistic writing, academia, etc.).
The story is beautifully and carefully crafted in such a way that each member of the family’s past is reconstructed for readers at a constant and balanced pace. The final effect of this is a cubistic view of a lived and shared past: the shifts in point of view, the distinct vantage points from which the story is narrated, lend themselves not so much to a final revelation of the truth, but to a verisimilitude of how individuals and personal shared experiences can take on a multiplicity of impressions and meanings, even when these are contradictory to one another. This is all cemented in the final chapter with a shift from a third-person narrator to a series of fragments narrated in first-person.
At its heart, the novel asks what abstractions like “home”, “trauma”, “legacy” and “history” mean, about how our origins, experiences of suffering, and our past implicate us in those realities of others, even unknowingly so, and how this truth can also wound us. In this sense, Floodlines very much points to universal human experiences that transcend identity, but it is also very much about the specific historical and geopolitical context of the Arab world that has been vilified, victimized, brutalized by Western imperialism and colonialism. Put another way, it is about families and shared pasts, but also about those individuals and societies who are forced to deal with repercussions of global war.
Like Mesopotamia in between two flowing rivers, Floodlines tells one Iraqi family’s story between the UK and Iraq over decades. The narration shifts focus from one family member to another, tracing each one’s meandering currents back and forth across various countries, from Iraq, Kuwait, the UK, the UAE, Egypt, or Yemen. The plot revolves around how the characters—three sisters, Ishtar, Zainab, and Mediha, their mother, Bridget, and Nizar, Zainab’s son—both seek to avoid, to embrace, re-piece and make sense of both their family past and legacy and that of the violence committed against their home. In one way or another, all of the character’s are searching for ways to articulate and work through these questions through different discourses of collective political violence and individual trauma and different forms of expression (art, journalistic writing, academia, etc.).
The story is beautifully and carefully crafted in such a way that each member of the family’s past is reconstructed for readers at a constant and balanced pace. The final effect of this is a cubistic view of a lived and shared past: the shifts in point of view, the distinct vantage points from which the story is narrated, lend themselves not so much to a final revelation of the truth, but to a verisimilitude of how individuals and personal shared experiences can take on a multiplicity of impressions and meanings, even when these are contradictory to one another. This is all cemented in the final chapter with a shift from a third-person narrator to a series of fragments narrated in first-person.
At its heart, the novel asks what abstractions like “home”, “trauma”, “legacy” and “history” mean, about how our origins, experiences of suffering, and our past implicate us in those realities of others, even unknowingly so, and how this truth can also wound us. In this sense, Floodlines very much points to universal human experiences that transcend identity, but it is also very much about the specific historical and geopolitical context of the Arab world that has been vilified, victimized, brutalized by Western imperialism and colonialism. Put another way, it is about families and shared pasts, but also about those individuals and societies who are forced to deal with repercussions of global war.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
I was so excited to see that a new book by Saleem Haddad was coming out after reading and loving 'Guapa', back when it was a new book! And this novel didn't disappoint. Multiple perspectives and storylines - which is just up my street - all winding together like the river which flows through the novel itself like a metaphor. A novel about love and loss and the difficulty of sustaining relationship when the world and events puts pressure on those relationships; a novel about our connection to the land and to our culture, which asks questions about what happens to that connection when we, the land or our culture changes.
I couldn't give the fifth star because in some places, especially in part 4, it was quite difficult to determine whose story we're reading. Perhaps this was deliberate, it which case I can appreciate it but it doesn't work for me. Perhaps it was a formatting issue with the eARC, in which case I hope it's fixed for the general release.
I received the eARC from NetGalley and have left this anonymous review in exchange.
I couldn't give the fifth star because in some places, especially in part 4, it was quite difficult to determine whose story we're reading. Perhaps this was deliberate, it which case I can appreciate it but it doesn't work for me. Perhaps it was a formatting issue with the eARC, in which case I hope it's fixed for the general release.
I received the eARC from NetGalley and have left this anonymous review in exchange.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
A very strong follow up from Saleem Haddad after his debut Guapa. The scope here is wider, observing an Iraqi family in exile across generations. It follows Bridget, a British woman married to Haydar, a famous Iraqi artist, and their three children Mediha, Ishtar, and Zainab. It also follows Zainab’s son Nizar, a gay war photographer. Different character’s stories mirror others and there is a lot of recurring imagery woven throughout.
Big themes include grief, homeland, memory and myth. Following a family of artists, art itself is examined as a tool for resistance, myth making, and healing. This exploration of art, imperialism, and diaspora reminded me of Martyr! By Kaveh Akbar (though I personally enjoyed this more).
There’s a lot of ground to cover here and I think it mostly succeeded. Nizar’s story featured less than I thought it would but we did get a good snapshot of how everyone in the family was shaped by their own history within the family and the conflicts within Iraq. At times the characters felt like mouthpieces for certain ideologies or philosophies which made the dialogue feel a bit unnatural. Overall though I really enjoyed this and think it will stick with me for a long time. I also really appreciated the afterword which revealed the story was inspired in part by real Iraqi artists Jawad and Lorna Saleem and was written with the support and blessing of the family.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC.
Big themes include grief, homeland, memory and myth. Following a family of artists, art itself is examined as a tool for resistance, myth making, and healing. This exploration of art, imperialism, and diaspora reminded me of Martyr! By Kaveh Akbar (though I personally enjoyed this more).
There’s a lot of ground to cover here and I think it mostly succeeded. Nizar’s story featured less than I thought it would but we did get a good snapshot of how everyone in the family was shaped by their own history within the family and the conflicts within Iraq. At times the characters felt like mouthpieces for certain ideologies or philosophies which made the dialogue feel a bit unnatural. Overall though I really enjoyed this and think it will stick with me for a long time. I also really appreciated the afterword which revealed the story was inspired in part by real Iraqi artists Jawad and Lorna Saleem and was written with the support and blessing of the family.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC.
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