وادي الفراشات

Baghdad, 1999 to 2024. Aziz Awad, a civil servant who looks after an archive, is thrown out of work and fights to hold his family together, until he takes a job driving a hearse to a graveyard set aside for abandoned children and outcasts. It is called the Valley of the Butterflies, because there the spirits of the abandoned become shining butterflies. One night Aziz meets the man who made it, the dervish Badri al-Naqqash, and learns its burial rites. From then on nothing is the same: he starts combing alleys and orchards for dead foundlings to bury there. Mixing fantasy with reality and grief with comedy, the story lands the unlucky driver in prison, charged with trading in human organs.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Length

215 pages in the original

Genres

Satire (assigned by AI)

Set in

Iraq, 1999–2024

First published

2024 by Dar al-Rafidain

Author's age

51 when first published

ISBN

9789922721545 (original)