Floodlines

http://www.renaud-bray.com

http://www.renaud-bray.com

A sweeping, multigenerational novel of art, exile, memory, and the enduring legacies of war—set between London and Baghdad in the shadow of the Islamic State’s rise. In the autumn of 2014, as the Islamic State tightens its grip on Iraq and images of cultural destruction flood the airwaves, three estranged Iraqi-British sisters are pulled back into each other’s orbit by the sudden discovery of their late father’s long-lost paintings. Beautiful, elusive Zainab; embittered, practical Mediha; and headstrong, queer Ishtar each lay claim to his legacy—an artistic and personal inheritance entwined with betrayal, exile, and a homeland they no longer recognize. Told in four parts—Archive Fever, Prisons of Hope, Carcasses of Home, and Where the Rivers Meet—Floodlines traces the emotional and political aftershocks of the US-led invasion of Iraq and the rise and fall of Saddam’s regime. As the sisters fight to preserve, erase, or repurpose the past, Zainab’s estranged son Nizar, a war correspondent haunted by trauma and heartbreak, returns to the family fold. With the reemergence of buried memories comes a reckoning: with nationhood, with mental health, with generational wounds too long left unspoken. Spanning continents and decades—from 1950s Baghdad to contemporary London, from the Tigris River to Yemeni refugee camps—Floodlines is at once intimate and epic in scope. Haddad’s textured prose and profound insight explore queerness in Arab culture, the role of art in survival and resistance, and the lingering, often invisible scars of colonialism and diaspora. Inspired by the author’s own family history and the artistic legacy of his great uncle, Jewad Saleem—pioneer of the Baghdad Modern Art Group—Floodlines is a rare novel that bridges the personal and the political, the historic and the immediate. It is a powerful meditation on what it means to belong, to create, to endure.