Nabeel’s Song

An epic true story of one family's experience of life before, during and after the regime of Saddam Hussein. Nabeel Yasin had an ordinary childhood, in a middle-class neighbourhood in 1950s Baghdad. He showed an early gift for poetry and as a young man became famous for it. But by the end of the 1970s Saddam's rise to power was encroaching on his life, and that of his family. Nabeel's brothers were arrested and he himself was denounced as an enemy of the state and fled Iraq in 1980. Nabeel’s Song tells his story, and that of the family that he left behind; his matriarch of a mother Sabria, his four brothers and their rebellion against Saddam's regime, and his two sisters - all ordinary people living in extraordinary and difficult times. The book takes us from the happier, pre-Saddam days - weddings, births and the arrival of the first TV in 1960 - to darker circumstances that not all the family members would survive. Jo Tatchell, a close friend of Nabeel's, writes a true and revealing portrait that allows us to identify with the people behind the headlines.