The American Granddaughter

Zeina Behnam was born in Baghdad to a family from Mosul and spent fifteen years in Iraq before her father, fleeing repression, took the family to the United States, where she now thinks of herself as American. When the US invades Iraq she signs up as an army interpreter, believing she is part of a liberation. Back in Baghdad she visits her grandmother Rahma, who rejects the occupiers outright, and learns that she has milk brothers in Sadr City, one of whom fights in the Mahdi Army. Translating her compatriots' grief for the soldiers, she begins to feel a strange pain she cannot name, and her faith in the American mission starts to waver.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Genres

War, Family, Migration (assigned by AI)

Set in

Iraq, United States, 2000s

First published

2008 by Dar al-Jadid

Author's age

56 when first published

ISBN

9789992142042 (Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing, Qatar)

9781623718688 (Interlink Books, United States)

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Wikidata