Review of In the Country I Love

In The Country I love by Alaa Al-Barkawi is a messy family drama which isn't really my genre but perhaps it should be because this is a wonderful novel, the tl;dr is five stars, go preorder and/or buy if you're reading this after May 2026. Or find it in a library.

It revolves around two families who are part of the Iraqi Shia diaspora in a small conservative white city in the United States of America with the two main characters being Yassir and Khaled who are best friends despite their families no longer being on speaking terms due to past tragedies. The trauma of the past has affected the two high school boys and they've started to go against their faith and family by drinking. While both are guilty of this, Yassir is the one who gets into trouble while Khaled remains a golden boy, especially as Yassir's indiscretions have left him the sole teenage parent of a baby girl, Yasmin.

And there are more tragedies in store, some caused by the Islamophobia of their new home, others lingering from their past as Iraqi refugees, and quite a few being self-inflicted. The book jumps backwards and forwards in time, counting down to and then away from a pivotal incident that has grave implications for one of the two main characters. The main difference is, while all the other conflicts served to force the characters apart, this one forces them together and leads to toxic secrets being unearthed.

One of the brilliant parts of the novel is how reading it feels like marrying into an Iraqi Shia family. At the start you slowly learn about the people in the family at a surface level and then as you spend more time with them, get to know them deeper, with new characters coming in and requiring time to get used to as well, the most important to my mind being the estranged daughter Kawther. As this is happening you will get familiar with the, perhaps foreign to you, Iraqi Shia culture and the importance of yearly religious events such as Ashura, and Arbaeen as you experience them along with the characters.

At the core of the novel is a deeply human question, that being what do you do when someone, or something, that you love, doesn't love you back?

And if that's not a universal sentiment, I don't know what is.

Thanks to the publisher and author for sending me an advance reader's copy for review consideration. All opinions are my own.