Publisher's Synopsis
Longlisted for the 2007 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
Nominated for the Lettre Ulysses Award 2006.
An autobiographical novel within a novel by London-based Iraqi author Samuel Shimon, translated from Arabic.
"A cunningly iconoclastic storyteller... with a keen cinematographic and unflinching eye for detail... a relentless raconteur"
Anton Shammas
A young Iraqi leaves home to become a Hollywood film-maker, but finds himself jailed, tortured, and thrown out of the first three countries on his voyage, in Syria, in East Beirut and in Jordan. Seeking refuge with the Palestinians in west Beirut, he finds his way to Hollywood barred. Later, living on the streets of Paris as a homeless refugee and writer, he dreams of making a film about his father, the deaf dumb baker who loves the young Queen of England, possibly starring Robert de Niro.
Samuel Shimon's first novel is a riveting tale of innocence and dreams, misery and humour, in which Arabic and Assyrian languages meet Hollywood and the films of John Ford in the streets of Paris and Iraq.
Born in 1956 into a poor Assyrian family in al-Habbaniyah, Iraq, Samuel Shimon started work at the age of six. He left Iraq in 1979 and after hair-raising experiences landed up in Paris, where he set up a small poetry press, Gilgamesh Editions. Resettled in the UK in the mid-1990s, in 1998 he founded Banipal magazine of modern Arab literature, and in 2003 set up his own, now hugely popular, Arabic independent literary website www.kikah.com, named after his deaf-dumb father.
