Iraqi poet and journalist Dunya Mikhail gathers the testimonies of Yazidi women kidnapped by ISIS, alongside the story of Abdullah Shrem, a beekeeper who became part of a secret rescue network helping women escape captivity.

It is a book of witness rather than spectacle: spare, direct, devastating, and built around the terrible work of listening to people whose lives have been violently interrupted.

Mikhail’s background as a poet makes for stark prose that keeps refusing melodrama, even while the material itself is almost unbearable: war, captivity, gendered violence, displacement, survival, testimony, memory, and the fragile logistics of escape. It sits somewhere between reportage, oral history, human rights document and elegy. A strong one for readers interested in contemporary Iraq, women’s testimony, political violence, ISIS/Yazidi history, exile writing, and books that understand survival as both ordinary and immense.

New Directions paperback, 2018. First published as a New Directions Paperback Original in 2018. Translated from Arabic to English by Max Weiss and Dunya Mikhail. Good second-hand condition, with some cover rubbing/handling and light edge/corner wear.