By Will Preston, for Full Stop (2019)
(…)
The very concept of “collateral damage,” after all, rests on the logic that others lack their own stories. They are only a means to an end: an acceptable loss, a supporting character in the narrative of someone else’s war. But to what extent? Within the framework of Antoon’s novel, it is not just the country’s people, or history, or cities, that have been reduced to collateral damage in the great American tragedy of the Iraq War. It is Iraq itself.

By Ghyath Manhel (University of Arkansas, Fayetteville – University of Kufa, Iraq), for World Literature Today (2019)
So many books have been written about the Iraq War (2003–2011) from both sides of that conflict, but Sinan Antoon’s The Book of Collateral Damage is unique in that it chooses to represent the human and environmental cost of that war. Nameer, an Iraqi American intellectual, visits his home country after the war and is traumatized by the hurt and damage he witnesses. Navigating the divide of his home and host cultures’ views of the war, he …

Read The National’s review (2019)
In Antoon’s latest novel, The Book of Collateral Damage [aka Index], the Iraqi author returns to the subject of the Second Gulf War…
But Antoon is too good a writer to simply retread old terrain. For this, his fourth novel, he explores new ground by depicting turmoil and carnage through a series of richly diverse second-hand sources.

Khaled Khalifa’s “Death is hard work” is on the longlist of the National Book Award!
The shortlist will be announced on October 8th, and the winner on November 20th.
 
 
The book has received wonderful praise:
“Masterly”
The New York Review of Books
“Brilliant”   “Unforgettable”
Wall Street Journal 

“Astonishing”     “recalls Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying””   “The power of the novel — of all Khalifa’s novels — is that it unfolds within a human context”
Los Angeles Times

“Intensely readable” “wryly compelling”
Financial times

“Robust in its doubts, humane in its gaze and gentle in its persistence”
The Guardian

“Stunning”
Herald
“Compelling book. …