'Skilfully told with extraordinary warmth, her story gives us an incredible and often surprising insight into a Middle-Eastern culture that is simultaneously exotic and familiar, comforting and terrifying ... This is a compelling, touching and beautifully written book that thoughtfully challenges assumptions about a place and a people lost in the miasma of war.'

'Leilah Nadir’s The Orange Trees of Baghdad reminds us that Iraq is not just a war; it is a country. Lovingly woven together from inherited memory and family lore, her Iraq is infinitely more vivid, more textured, and more heartbreaking than what we see nightly on the news. In the debates about winning and losing the war, this is a book about what loss really means — the theft of history and of homeland.'

'Leilah Nadir’s insightful, searching story about her Iraqi roots, family, exile, and survival, told in absorbing and moving language, reveals the great civilization now under assault and the human beings under perpetual blast, condemnation, and bombardment.'

'Deep, moving insight into what is, or was, the mystical Baghdad.'

'The Orange Trees of Baghdad is a stunning book, the best I’ve read in the past year. Leilah Nadir takes us on her quest to meet the members of her family whose lives have been uprooted by war. In the process, we are drawn into the heart of the world’s most ancient civilization. In the haunting, dreamlike pages of this book, we discover that as Baghdad is destroyed, the roots of our own deepest part are being torn asunder. Hypnotically readable.'

'A detailed exploration of life in Baghdad filtered through the voices and memories of the Iraqi diaspora.'

'A very finely written, deftly crafted work about Iraq that translates this epic disaster into human terms and makes us understand the endless suffering of its people. Touching, insightful and poignant.'

'With the American public showing increasing levels of anger over the number of troops perishing in Iraq, its leadership might do well to read The Orange Trees of Baghdad for a sense of just how difficult the conflict has made things for ordinary Iraqi civilians ... This is a powerful and important book.'