 | |
| Author | Gina Wilkinson |
|---|---|
| Country | Australia |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Historical fiction |
| Publisher | Hachette Australia |
Publication date | 29th December 2020 |
| Media type | Paperback |
| Pages | 384 |
| ISBN | 9780733646409 |
When the Apricots Bloom is a 2020 historical fiction novel by Gina Wilkinson, based on her time spent as a foreign correspondent in Iraq. [1]
On the precipice of the United States' invasion of Iraq in 2002, the Iraqi secret police ramp up inspection. In this patriarchal society, they force Huda, a young woman working in the Australian embassy, to befriend and spy on Ally, the young American wife of the Australian ambassador, threatening her son if she disobeys. Ally's late mother worked in Iraq in the 1980s, and she wants to find out more about that time. Huda is conflicted about reporting on Ally to the secret police, and wants to protect her son even from threats, so she calls on her best friend, artist Rania, to help her procure a passport for him to leave. Rania also plans to send her children away, but is stuck being forced to paint a portrait of leader Saddam Hussein.
Gina Wilkinson was a foreign correspondent in Iraq for over a year in the early 2000s, under the rule of Saddam Hussein. [2]
For The Sydney Morning Herald , Jessie Tu praised the book's fresh perspective on war storytelling, and said that "Wilkinson's evocative language shapes the novel into one of suspense, intrigue and conspiracy". [3]
Kim Reardon of Coast Community News said it is "a wonderful book with strong characters". [2] It was featured as one of "Martin's Must Reads" on KRCU in the US. [4]
The book's name When the Apricots Bloom is an Egyptian idiom that has a similar meaning to the English expression When Pigs Fly . [5]
Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti was an Iraqi politician and revolutionary who served as the fifth president of Iraq from 1979 to 2003. He also served as prime minister of Iraq from 1979 to 1991 and later from 1994 to 2003. He was a leading member of the revolutionary Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party and later the Baghdad-based Ba'ath Party and its regional organization, the Iraqi Ba'ath Party, which espoused Ba'athism, a mix of Arab nationalism and Arab socialism.
Uday Saddam Hussein was an Iraqi politician and the elder son of Saddam Hussein. He held numerous positions as a sports chairman, military officer and businessman, and was the head of the Iraqi Olympic Committee, Iraq Football Association, and the Fedayeen Saddam.
Sajida Khairallah Talfah is the widow of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, and mother of two sons and three daughters with him. She is the oldest daughter of Khairallah Talfah, her husband's maternal uncle.
April Catherine Glaspie is an American former diplomat and senior member of the Foreign Service, best known for her role in the events leading up to the Gulf War.
Kenneth Michael Pollack is an American former CIA intelligence analyst and expert on Middle East politics and military affairs. He has served on the National Security Council staff and has written several articles and books on international relations. Currently, he is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, "where he works on Middle Eastern political-military affairs, focusing in particular on Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf countries. Before that he was Senior Fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution and a senior advisor at Albright Stonebridge Group, a global business strategy firm.
Raghad Saddam Hussein is an Iraqi in exile and the eldest daughter of former Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein.
Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash is an Iraqi scientist and academic. Ammash was often referred to as "Mrs. Anthrax" due to her alleged association with an Iraqi biological weapons program.
Amina Haydar al-Sadr, known as Bint al-Huda al-Sadr, was an Iraqi educator and political activist who was executed by Saddam Hussein's regime along with her brother, Ayatullah Sayyid Mohammad Baqir al-Sadr, in 1980.
Saddam Hussein, a former President of Iraq, wrote four novels and a number of poems. The first two books were "Written by He Who Wrote It", a traditional way in Arabic writing to preserve anonymity.
Zabibah and the King is a romance novel, originally published anonymously in Iraq in 2000, that was written by Saddam Hussein.
In the runup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, press stories appeared in the United Kingdom and United States of a plastic shredder or wood chipper into which Saddam and Qusay Hussein fed opponents of their Baathist rule. These stories attracted worldwide attention and boosted support for military action, in stories with titles such as "See men shredded, then say you don't back war". A year later, it was determined there was not enough evidence to support the existence of such a machine.
The Fortified Castle is Saddam Hussein's third of four novels. The book involves political metaphor. It is 713 pages and was published in 2001. It is another allegorical work. It concerns the delayed wedding of the Iraqi hero, who fought in the war against Iran, to a Kurdish girl.
Begone, Demons is Saddam Hussein's fourth and last novel. It is a fictional novel, with political metaphor. It is thought to have been written in anticipation of the 2003 Iraq War in 2002 or 2003. It was not yet published before the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
The execution of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein took place on 30 December 2006. Saddam was sentenced to death by hanging, after being convicted of crimes against humanity by the Iraqi Special Tribunal for the Dujail massacre—the killing of 148 Iraqi Shi'ites in the town of Dujail—in 1982, in retaliation for an assassination attempt against him.
House of Saddam is a 2008 British docudrama television miniseries that charted the rise and fall of Saddam Hussein. A co-production between BBC Television and HBO Films, the series was first broadcast on BBC Two in four parts between 30 July and 20 August 2008.
The phrase "when pigs fly" is an adynaton—a figure of speech so hyperbolic that it describes an impossibility. The implication of such a phrase is that the circumstances in question will never occur. The phrase has been used in various forms since the 1600s as a sarcastic remark.
Rihab Rashid Taha al-Azawi is an Iraqi microbiologist, dubbed Dr Germ by United Nations weapons inspectors, who worked in Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program. A 1999 report commissioned by the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) named her as one of the world's most dangerous women. Dr Taha admitted producing germ warfare agents but said they had been destroyed.
The Tulfah family was the family of Saddam Hussein of Ba'athist Iraq who ruled from 1979 to 2003 and established a single party authoritarian government under the control of the Ba'ath Party until the invasion by US/UK forces in 2003.
9 Parts of Desire is a play written by Heather Raffo.
Hadia Hussein is an Iraqi writer. The author of numerous novels and short story collections, she is best known for her Arabic Booker Prize-nominated novel Riyam and Kafa. Other noted books include Beyond Love, "Very noisy night" by Al-Thakera Publishing House and That's Another Matter.
 | This article about a historical novel of the 2020s is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. See guidelines for writing about novels. Further suggestions might be found on the article's talk page. |