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Sweet Dates in Basra: A Novel

Overview

Just when her family should be arranging her marriage, Kathmiya Mahmoud, a young Marsh Arab maiden, is sent from her home in Iraq's idyllic countryside to the unfamiliar city of Basra, where she must survive on her paltry earnings as a servant. Her only asset--her exquisite beauty--brings more peril than peace. Worse, her mother appears to be keeping a secret about her own mysterious past, one that could threaten Kathmiya's destiny forever.

In this lost Iraq of the 1940s, a time of rich traditions and converging worlds, Kathmiya meets Shafiq, a Jewish boy whose brotherhood with his Muslim neighbor Omar proves that religion is no barrier to friendship. But in a world where loss of honor is punishable by death, the closeness that grows between Kathmiya and Shafiq becomes dangerous as a doomed love takes root. When British warplanes begin bombing Iraq and the country's long-simmering tensions explode, the power of an unbreakable boyhood bond and a transcendent love must overcome the deepening fractures of a collapsing society.

Set during the tumultuous years surrounding the Second World War, Sweet Dates in Basra is the redemptive story of two very different cultures, and a powerful reminder that no walls can confine the human spirit.

Author Information

Jessica Jiji

Jessica Jiji is the author of Diamonds Take Forever and Sweet Dates in Basra. She also coauthored, with Paul Grossman, three feature-length screenplays: Miss Interpreter, a romantic-comedy-political-thriller about a young UN translator who accidentally stumbles on love and adventure; Queen of the CIA; a screwball comedy about the misadventures of a gay fashion designer recruited by the Agency; and I Married a Shaman, a romantic comedy about a young Korean-American woman whose white-bread husband takes up her mother's traditional Asian religion--to extremes. Miss Interpreter was optioned under the original title Force for Peace by Lantern Pictures.


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0061689300

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Product Details

  • Published by

    HarperCollins

  • Publish Date

    April 27, 2008 

  • Print ISBN

    0061689300

  • eBook ISBN

    9780061991431

  • Imprint

    HarperCollins

  • Filesize

    508.29 KB

  • Number of Print Pages*

    368

* Number of eBook pages may differ. Click here for more information.