A Brighter Fear

Author(s): Kerry Drewery

Location(s): Baghdad

Genre(s): Young Adult

Era(s): Early 2000s

Location

Content

A beautiful love story and contemporary fairytale set against the backdrop of the Iraq war, this stunning and moving novel will break your heart, only to put it back together again…

This is the story of Lina, a teenage girl from Baghdad. It starts in 2003, as the bombs begin to fall on the city.

In it, Lina fights to survive, to find a life for herself amid the chaos of war, to find what happened to her mother in the years before the war, when she was taken away by the secret police. She also falls in love, with the one person she should never have fallen in love with.

It is many things. It is a love story, both for a country and for a person. It is about an amazing girl, growing up in the worst circumstances imaginable. It contains a necklace, that was lost but might still be found. And that is all we can say, without ruining this extraordinary and beautiful modern fairy tale…

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Book Reviews

Lead Review

In this book Lina is a teenager, who taker the readers by the hand and shows us her city of Baghdad – we experience through her eyes the terror and destruction under Saddam and...

Read review

The story of Lina brings home to us in our comfortable lives and stable country what it may be like to live in a city torn apart by war and occupation: a life where bombings, abductions, suspicion and fear...