If I Live to Tell

I looked at the picture in my passport. I hadn’t seen it in two years. There was my almost fifteen-year-old self—beautiful, naïve, expectant. I looked at the picture from different angles, then held it up to my face in the mirror. Everything I had been through was summed up there in those two faces. The fresh-faced girl flowering into womanhood—her whole self shimmering on her skin—and the dolled-up skeleton who buried under makeup the bitter fact that her dreams and longings… her identity… had withered under the desert sun like tender herbs. And the only intervening fact was Iraq.

If I Live to Tell follows one woman’s struggle to discover purpose and identity in the face of lifelong tragedy, betrayal, and abuse. Set on three continents, this gripping true story provides a rare glimpse into the world and heart of the largely invisible victimized woman.

Bio: Akeela Hayder Green has gone through it all—abused and abandoned by her English mother and Iraqi father, forced into an arranged Muslim marriage, betrayed and broken by all the people who ever promised to love and protect her. Yet she survived it all and lived to tell her story… a story like nothing you’ve ever heard before.