Sign up for our newsletters to receive our Best of 2024 ezine!

Book Summary and Reviews of I Remember Fallujah by Feurat Alani

I Remember Fallujah by Feurat Alani

I Remember Fallujah

A Novel

by Feurat Alani

  • Critics' Consensus (10):
  • Readers' Rating (1):
  • Published:
  • Sep 2024, 240 pages
  • Rate this book

About this book

Book Summary

In this poignant first novel of memory, identity, and generational trauma, a child of political refugees tries to uncover the past his dying father kept secret, painting a powerful, layered portrait of Iraq from the 1950s to the 2000s.

As a young man in the early 1970s, Rami fled his home to escape Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. In France, he built a new life and had a family, working hard to become a successful immigrant. He barely speaks of his time over there, and his son, Euphrates, feels it like a wall between them. When the now elderly Rami is hospitalized with a fatal cancer, Euphrates sees his last chance to learn more about this enigmatic man, and himself.

Shifting between past and present, I Remember Fallujah brings to vivid life Rami's coming-of-age in a land devastated by violent conflict. His memories of the city, which became a stronghold for Hussein's Ba'ath Party, reveal the courageous acts of resistance, as well as complex loyalties, of left-wing Iraqis fighting against a brutal Arab nationalist movement. And where Rami's amnesia has erased his exile, Euphrates seeks to fill in the gaps, with memories of his childhood in Paris, and visits to a changed Iraq that will unearth key facts.

Inspired by Feurat Alani's own history, this unforgettable first novel is a moving tribute to the love between father and son that explores the nuances of the immigrant dream, and how we live with the family and country into which we were born.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

Media Reviews

"Poignant and devastating, I Remember Fallujah is a novel about how the vagaries of memory support the weight of secrets too painful to speak out loud." —Foreword Reviews

"Brilliant...A son's tribute to his father, a beautiful act of recognition." —Le Figaro Littéraire

"In his poignant first novel, reporter Feurat Alani examines his Iraqi roots and the complexity of filiation." —Livres Hebdo

"Feurat Alani's debut novel is a lyrical journey of remembering, a son's voyage to salvage fading memories of an amnesiac father and piece together a past too personal and precious to be lost to oblivion. As the protagonist, Euphrates, rediscovers a father and a fatherland, he has to reconcile the personal history with the objective truth. Feurat Alani's Iraq is not just a country; it becomes any place you and I have been expelled from, a home you and I yearn to return to." —Ali Araghi, author of The Immortals of Tehran

"A profoundly moving novel about the scars and cruelties of history, an unforgettable portrait of Iraq, and a deeply humane story of fathers and sons. I was struck by every page." —Ayşegül Savaş, author of Walking on the Ceiling and White on White

This information about I Remember Fallujah was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Reader Reviews

Write your own reviewwrite your own review

Susanne Carter

I Remember Fallujah
This was my favorite book of 2024. It is a beautifully written, poetic coming-of-age novel about the son of a political refugee from Iraq now living in France with his family. The partly autobiographical novel moves back and forth in time between father and son, describing their experiences and Euphrates’ attempts to get to know his terminally ill father.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Author Information

Feurat Alani

Feurat Alani is a French journalist and documentary filmmaker who has spent more than seventeen years reporting across the Middle East. He is the author of two graphic novels, The Flavors of Iraq, which won the Prix Albert-Londres, France's highest journalism prize, in 2019; and Falloujah, ma campagne perdue (Fallujah, my lost campaign). His work has appeared in a variety of international outlets including the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Le Monde Diplomatique, France 24, Mediapart, Al Jazeera, Arte, Canal Plus, and Radio Canada. His debut novel, I Remember Fallujah, received the Arab Literature Prize and the Senghor First Novel Prize, and was a finalist for the Goncourt First Novel Prize.

Adriana Hunter studied French and Drama at the University of London. She has translated more than ninety books, including Marc Petitjean's The Heart: Frida Kahlo in Paris and Hervé Le Tellier's The Anomaly and Eléctrico W, winner of the French-American Foundation's 2013 Translation Prize in Fiction. She lives in Kent, England.

More Author Information

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

More Recommendations

Readers Also Browsed . . .

more literary fiction...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern
    The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern
    by Lynda Cohen Loigman
    Lynda Cohen Loigman's delightful novel The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern opens in 1987. The titular ...
  • Book Jacket: Small Rain
    Small Rain
    by Garth Greenwell
    At the beginning of Garth Greenwell's novel Small Rain, the protagonist, an unnamed poet in his ...
  • Book Jacket: Daughters of Shandong
    Daughters of Shandong
    by Eve J. Chung
    Daughters of Shandong is the debut novel of Eve J. Chung, a human rights lawyer living in New York. ...
  • Book Jacket: The Women
    The Women
    by Kristin Hannah
    Kristin Hannah's latest historical epic, The Women, is a story of how a war shaped a generation ...

BookBrowse Book Club

Book Jacket
In Our Midst
by Nancy Jensen
In Our Midst follows a German immigrant family’s fight for freedom after their internment post–Pearl Harbor.
Who Said...

The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Big Holiday Wordplay 2024

Enter Now

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.