The Book of Collateral Damage

Sinan Antoon returns to the Iraq war in a poetic and provocative tribute to reclaiming memory Formally daring, stylistically inventive, this is Antoons most complex work to date. Malcolm Forbes, The National The celebrated author Sinan Antoons 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 Wadoods project, Nameer finds life in New York movingly intertwined with fragments from his homelands past and its presentdestroyed letters, verses, epigraphs, and anecdotesin this stylistically ambitious panorama of the wreckage of war and the power of memory.