Since 2003, as a result of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime, the occupation of Iraq by American forces and the internal political strife, interest has increased in Western countries in Iraq in general and Iraqi society, culture and literature in particular. At home and in exile, Iraqi authors have been prolific, unleashing an unprecedented number of novels and short stories about the years under dictatorship and the successive wars their country has witnessed.

I found myself drawn to this compelling literature because it represents a missing piece in the puzzle of knowledge of and relationship to contemporary Iraqi society and culture. The world's relationship to Iraq has been dominated by the West's own military, political and academic discourses on Iraq; there remains a significant gap in this knowledge that can be filled by the testimony of Iraqi writers, told in their own voices, and, to date, only in their own language, offering their own perspectives on the events that have shaped their history and changed their lives.

The character of the past three decades in Iraqi history can be summarised as ‘dictatorship and war’ and ‘war and occupation’. Years under a stifling dictatorship were replaced by military occupation following a long period of sanctions and a ‘pure war’ that used ultramodern technology and was marked by the absence of ‘symbolic exchange’, as Jean Baudrillard would put it. In the context of the concomitant fear, doubts, and uncertainty, what does the Iraqi combined narrative of these years tell us? How does fiction explore these times of war? How does the novel portray Iraqi individuals in their relation to war and sovereign power? From what perspectives do Iraqi authors choose to record the historical content? How do they represent the postmodern war in their novels? And how does the ‘new Iraq’ look in the recent writings?

This book explores how recent novels portray the struggles of the Iraqi individual in a landscape where violence and death proliferate, focusing specifically on the tangible experiences of the soldier, the war deserter, the suicide bomber and the camp detainee.