A Sky So Close

A coming of age novel set in Iraq and Britain, A Sky So Close is the story of an unnamed girl, daughter of an Iraqi father and English mother, as she struggles to reconcile a complicated lineage and form a personal identity.
In the jacket matter, title information for photographer Susan Meiselas’ image (cropped to a detail of the original for the books cover) is simply stated as ‘1992’. In fact, the photo, from Meiselas’ major body of work, Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History, was made in August of 1988 around the village of Koreme, in the autonomous Kurdish region of Iraq. The 1992 date may be based on the start of forensic exhumations on gravesites from the genocidal Anfal Campaign (1988) in which Iraqi forces killed tens of thousands of Kurds.