I Stared at the Night of the City by Bakhtiyar Ali is a novel set against the political and emotional aftermath of war in Iraqi Kurdistan.

It follows a narrator searching for a missing friend—one thread among many in a city saturated with memory, absence, and ruin. 

Ali’s writing is often described as magical realist, but that flattens what’s actually happening. The novel bends reality without abandoning it—dream logic, coincidence, and symbolic encounters bleed into the everyday, but readers will understand that this is something straightforward realism can’t contain. 

This is a strong copy for readers of translated fiction who are comfortable sitting inside ambiguity—people who read for texture, for political undercurrents, for the feeling of a place rather than a clean narrative line. 

2016 Periscope (UK) paperback edition, translated from the Sorani Kurdish by Kareem Abdulrahman. As new.