Frankenstein in Baghdad

Hadi is a scavenger in Baghdad under U.S. occupation, and a familiar oddball at a local café. He gathers human body parts from the rubble-strewn streets and stitches them into a single corpse. His stated reason is that the government should have to recognise the parts as people and give them a proper burial.

Then the corpse goes missing. Murders start across the city, and reports come in of a horribly disfigured criminal who has been shot but cannot be killed. Hadi comes to understand what he has made: a creature that needs human flesh to survive. It targets the guilty first, then anyone who gets in its way.

This is a horror novel set in contemporary Iraq, and it leans on black humor as much as on dread. It shows a surreal version of daily life in the occupied city, where violence is so ordinary that a patchwork body can pass among the living.

Expect a dark, uneasy read that mixes the macabre with the absurd. The book won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction and was a finalist for the International Booker Prize.