Summoning up the vanished world of mid-twentieth-century Baghdad, Elizabeth Loudon's richly evocative story of one family calls into question British attitudes and policies in Iraq and offers up a penetrating reflection on cross-cultural marriage and the lives of women caught between different worlds.

Readers and reviewers alike are praising A Stranger In Baghdad for its "stunning acumen and imagination" (The New Arab). Noshin Bokth describes it as "a delicately crafted saga of subterfuge, family, identity, and the turbulent convergence of disparate cultures". In the Washington Independent Review of Books, reviewer AA Bastian admires how the book "majestically dances you into the thick of it all, down to the 'long black fringes' of Diane’s shawl and the essence of old Baghdad embodied in their first home."

The Journal of Contemporary Iraq and the Arab World described the novel as "vivid and thought-provoking, capturing the emotional depth of her characters as well as the historical and political realities of Iraq. A Stranger in Baghdad is a novel that will stay with readers long after they have finished reading it."

For full reviews, see:

• • Washington Independent Review of Books
• • Historical Novel Society
• • The New Arab
• • Middle East Monitor
• • PressReader
• • World Literature Today
• • Aramcoworld