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The President's Gardens cover art

The President's Gardens

By: Muhsin Al-Ramli, Luke Leafgren - translator
Narrated by: Peter Noble
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Summary

One Hundred Years of Solitude meets The Kite-Runner in Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

On the third day of Ramadan, the village wakes to find the severed heads of nine of its sons stacked in banana crates by the bus stop. One of them belonged to one of the most wanted men in Iraq, known to his friends as Ibrahim the Fated. How did this good and humble man earn the enmity of so many? What did he do to deserve such a death?

The answer lies in his lifelong friendship with Abdullah Kafka and Tariq the Befuddled, who each has his own remarkable story to tell. It lies on the scarred, irradiated battlefields of the Gulf War and in the ashes of a revolution strangled in its cradle. It lies in the steadfast love of his wife and the festering scorn of his daughter. And above all it lies behind the locked gates of The President's Gardens, buried alongside the countless victims of a pitiless reign of terror.

©2017 Muhsin Al-Ramli (P)2017 WF Howes Ltd
Literary Fiction Historical Fiction
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Critic reviews

"A contemporary tragedy of epic proportions. No author is better placed than Muhsin Al-Ramli, already a star in the Arabic literary scene, to tell this story. I read it in one sitting." (Hassan Blasim, winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for The Iraqi Christ)

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Profile Image for Nadir

Great story but open ended. Ok performance

Good performance let down by very terrible pronounciation of arabic words and names. The narrator should have invested more time learning this or else there are many competent bilingual narrators who are up to the task that could better recreate the accent and the feel of common expressions used.

Loved the story however if you're a person that hates loose ends you maybe frustrated by the ending.

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