cover image Late for Tea at the Deer Palace: The Lost Dreams of My Iraqi Family

Late for Tea at the Deer Palace: The Lost Dreams of My Iraqi Family

Tamara Chalabi, HarperCollins, $27.99 (488p) ISBN 978-0-06-124039-3

A wealthy clan weathers Iraq's turbulent history in this intimate retrospective. Chalabi, daughter of the controversial Iraqi political figure Ahmed Chalabi, recounts her family's journey from WWI through its exile after the 1958 nationalist coup. Her grandfather Hadi was one of Iraq's richest and most prominent men, and high politics swirl in the background as Ottoman and British imperialists, Arab nationalists, Sunnis, Shiites, Communists, and a transplanted monarchy jockey for power. But Chalabi tells the story mainly from the viewpoint of Hadi's wife Bibi, a feisty, progressive woman, complete with cigarettes, who chafes against the constraints of traditional Islamic femininity. Chalabi's novelistic treatment—full of arranged marriages, household melodrama, and big, steaming feasts—paints a rich panorama of Iraqi domestic life as the nation evolves toward a hopeful, modern future, until the coup (Chalabi's account is gripping) turns it onto a darker path. The author's political chronicle is sketchy—we don't really learn why Nasserite mobs wanted to kill the Chalabis in 1958—and her brief memoir of later years grinds some of her father's axes. But her family portrait is most telling as a glimpse of a contented, prosperous Iraqi normalcy that might have been. Photos. (Jan.)