The Book of Collateral Damage

By: Sinan Antoon, Jonathan Wright - translator

Narrated by: Fajer Al-Kaisi

Sinan Antoon returns to the Iraq war in a poetic and provocative tribute to reclaiming memory.

Widely-celebrated author Sinan Antoon's fourth and most sophisticated novel follows Nameer, a young Iraqi scholar earning his doctorate at Harvard, who is hired by filmmakers to help document the devastation of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. During the excursion, Nameer ventures to al-Mutanabbi street in Baghdad, famed for its bookshops, and encounters Wadood, an eccentric bookseller who is trying to catalogue everything destroyed by war, from objects, buildings, books and manuscripts, flora and fauna, to humans.

Entrusted with the catalogue and obsessed with Wadood's project, Nameer finds life in New York movingly intertwined with fragments from his homeland's past and its present-destroyed letters, verses, epigraphs, and anecdotes - in this stylistically ambitious panorama of the wreckage of war and the power of memory.

©2016 Sinan Antoon; Engligh Translation Copyright 2019 by Jonathan Wright (P)2021 Tantor

Absolutely beautiful and tragic

I absolutely adored this book. It was beautifully written and structured, with a great vocal performance.

excellent book

Excellent book, highly recommended. I read few years ago in Arabic, and now listened to this amazing English / audio translation.

I rained

if you've read the book, you'll understand "I rained. " this book is lyrical, heart wrenching and honest. I love the main character and his girlfriend. the colloquies are breath taking. what a tribute to a country ravaged by a senseless war. I'm going to buy a hard copy of this so I can linger over the poems. narrator is excellent

one of my favorite authors

beautifully written. Sinan is an incredible writer
better on paper though. the story jumps from location and person often and is hard to follow just listening rather than seeing on paper. maybe it is just me.