Sugar and Spice and All Things

My novel is set in 1966; Baghdad is a cosmopolitan city, looking to invest in the future with money from its oil revenue. Orla, Jack, and their two young children, Aiden and Dolly, live on the bank of the river Tigris. The family has a lively ex-pat lifestyle as well as friendships with the local people. Jack works as a Hydro-Engineer but Orla stays at home to look after the children. Both Orla and Dolly feel connected to Iraq through the myths and stories related to them by Maha, the family's Iraqi maid. The past haunts Orla, the floods in Baghdad, and the loss of her firstborn Cian. Dolly has only ever known the Technicolor life in Baghdad, the long hot summers, the warm, chaotic lifestyle. The family’s time in Iraq comes to an end and they travel overland back to Britain in their Ford Cortina Estate. The journey forces the family into a state of uneasy limbo without the usual distractions of work, school and house. Driving, camping, exploring, reflecting, they become suspended between two worlds; the one they have left behind in Baghdad and the one they will soon re-enter in Birmingham. They pass through different countries that each possesses their own myths and magic: Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Austria, Germany and France, along the way. The loss of Baghdad, Maha, the family’s golden ex-pat lifestyle, unfolds against the powerful combination of place and people they encounter as they find their way home. My research helped bring to life the experience I had had as a child when I lived in Baghdad. It is auto-fiction, about a time when people of different religions and cultures rubbed along together in a country that has always been ruled by the desert and the sun.