Saadawi Ahmed, trans. Wright Jonathan Oneworld Publications, 2018, PB, 288pp, £7.48, 978-1786070609
Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction and was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. It is set in Iraq’s capital in 2005, then occupied by the US military, at a time of escalating violence. I felt that this novel is a cousin to Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. Here too a city is beset by the forces …