The Bird Tattoo
A Novel
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4.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A powerful and sweeping novel set over two tumultuous decades in Iraq from the National Book Award-nominated author of The Beekeeper.
Shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction.
Helen is a young Yazidi woman, living with her family in a mountain village in Sinjar, northern Iraq. One day she finds a local bird caught in a trap, and frees it, just as the trapper, Elias, returns. At first angry, he soon sees the error of his ways and vows never to keep a bird captive again.
Helen and Elias fall deeply in love, marry and start a family in Sinjar. The village has seemed to stand apart from time, protected by the mountains and too small to attract much political notice. But their happy existence is suddenly shattered when Elias, a journalist, goes missing. A brutal organization is sweeping over the land, infiltrating even the remotest corners, its members cloaking their violence in religious devotion. Helen’s search for her husband results in her own captivity and enslavement.
She eventually escapes her captors and is reunited with some of her family. But her life is forever changed. Elias remains missing and her sons, now young recruits to the organization, are like strangers. Will she find harmony and happiness again?
For readers of Elif Shafak, Samar Yazbek's Planet of Clay, or Ahmed Saadawi's Frankenstein in Baghdad, Dunya Mikhail's The Bird Tattoo chronicles a world of great upheaval, love and loss, beauty and horror, and will stay in readers’ minds long after the last page.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Iraqi American poet and journalist Mikhail revisits in this frank and wrenching novel the subject of The Beekeeper, her nonfiction narrative about the impact of Daesh, the name for ISIS, on the Yazidi religious minority of northern Iraq. In 2014, a Yazidi woman named Helen has been captured by Daesh and sold into sexual slavery. Elias, her journalist husband, is held captive by Daesh, and her two sons are captured and trained as Daesh soldiers. After chapters describing Helen's horrifying circumstances, Mikhail backtracks to 1999, when Helen meets Elias, a Yazidi man who grew up in the city of Mosul. The two marry and tattoo their ring fingers with images of the birds that are important in Yazidi culture. Mikhail then follows the couple through the years leading up to Daesh's ascension in Iraq, and on through the struggle of Helen and other captive women to escape and rebuild their lives. While the author loses focus on the central narrative of Helen and her family, switching to the adventures of a smuggler nicknamed Goofball as he rescues numerous other women, she returns to Helen for a satisfying conclusion. Mikhail's sympathetic and fast-moving story of ordinary life and its violent disruption makes for a moving love letter to the Yazidi.
