"With a bird’s eye view and a sardonic, at times sarcastic tone, as well as a rich spectrum of characters, the narrator shows the massive shifts in Iraqi society."—Sinan Antoon, author of The Book of Collateral Damage
"You could read Hayat Sharara’s When Darkness Falls to grasp what life was like in 1990s Iraq under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. Or you could read When Darkness Falls to fathom how universities cave under political pressure which is all the more urgent today. Or you could read When Darkness Falls as an exemplary example of Arabic existential literature. Whatever the reason, you simply must read this extraordinary and necessary novel, exquisitely translated by Sharara’s daughter Zeinab Saleh, and now finally available to the English-language reader."—Moustafa Bayoumi, author of How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America
Description
Set on a Baghdad university campus in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, When Darkness Falls unfolds across a single spring semester in the life of Dr. Nouman Mahmood, an aging professor who dreams of only one thing: retirement. Once a young idealist drawn to movements promising social justice and democracy, Nouman now navigates a world governed by surveillance, suspicion, and fear. His application for early retirement is a quiet act of desperation, an attempt to preserve his dignity even at the cost of financial ruin under crushing UN sanctions. But approval is far from certain, and the waiting becomes its own form of torment.
Through Nouman’s eyes, Hayat Sharara renders the texture of everyday life under Saddam Hussein’s regime with unflinching precision. Here, arriving a few minutes late can trigger an investigation. “Students of special admission” report on their professors. Security forms demand accounts of relatives’ political sympathies. Colleagues who fall out of favor vanish from their posts, accused of treason.
In 1997, two months after completing this novel, Sharara took her own life. What she left behind is a haunting testament to life under authoritarian rule—a work hailed in the Arabic press as a masterpiece of political witness, now available in English for the first time.
About the Author
Hayat Sharara (1935–1997) was a scholar, translator, and novelist. While a professor of Russian literature at Baghdad University, she authored books in Arabic on the works of Leo Tolstoy, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Vissarion Belinsky, as well as a history of Russian literature in the nineteenth century. She also wrote an authoritative biography of the renowned modernist Iraqi poet Nazik al-Malaika.
Zainab Saleh is associate professor of anthropology at Haverford College. She is the author of Return to Ruin: Iraqi Narratives of Exile and Nostalgia, winner of the 2022 Evelyn Shakir Non-Fiction Arab American Book Award.
March 2027