Catherine Cobham and Fabio Caiani look in depth at four authors who started writing in Iraq in or around the 1950s to explore a pivotal moment in Iraqi novel writing. They analyse the key texts by Abd al-Malik Nuri, Gha'ib Tu'ma Farman, Mahdi Isa al-Saqr and Fu'ad al-Takarli, evaluating and comparing their aesthetic and poetic qualities. It is in these works that Iraqi fiction came of age and reached artistic maturity. The best of them are among...