Late for Tea at the Deer Palace

Tamara Chalabi has a PhD from Harvard University in History. Her first book, 'The Shi'is of Jabal'Amil and the New Lebanon: 1918-1943' was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2006. She has written for the 'Sunday Times', 'New Republic', 'Wall Street Journal', 'Slate' and 'Prospect', on war, culture, encounters, and identities. She lives in London.

'In this absorbing book [Chalabi] has wrapped up much that is important in Iraq's history in the story of her own family's development through the 20th century!She does so beautifully, in a complex family memoir attuned to the beats of Iraqi history!Chalabi's aim is to reclaim for her readers a country that war and news have reduced to "a desert of tanks, screaming women and barefoot children". She succeeds: a meditation on exile, a moving family portrait, thoughtful and well-researched, "Late for Tea" gives Iraq, as much as the Chalabi family, its story.' Jason Goodwin, Spectator 'Delicate and intricately wrought!there is a sense of poignancy and acute longing for an Iraq that is all but unrecognisable today' Traveller 'Tamara's tale is not about WMDs or insurgents. It is the story of a bourgeois Iraqi family set against the opulent backdrop of the Ottoman Empire!It is the story of Iraq, but told from an Iraqi woman's perspective; then it also becomes the story of a young woman's struggle for identity!"Late for Tea at the Deer Palace" has a whimsical, magical quality' Janine di Giovani, Telegraph 'Chalabi describes a litany of privilege through the 1930s and 1940s: picnics on islands in the Tigris, tea parties with royal princesses, card games, matchmaking and gossip!From the sweet buffalo cream her great-grandfather adores to the dancing girls in the risque new cafes her grandfather frequents, the richness of an "expired epoch" long past is lovingly rendered' Wendell Steavenson, Sunday Times 'This book combines personal vignettes with the tumultuous march of history and the long years of exile and suffering!more powerful than "Wild Swans"!an unusual hybrid, and a compelling read because of the grand sense of world history it conveys!the history of modern Iraq appears in its immense cruelty![a] sensible, sensitive, learned work.' Chibli Mallat, The Daily Star (Lebanon) 'It's an admirable endeavour to have Iraq addressed by someone who is in so many ways able to approach it from two worlds: old bourgeois Iraq versus new lumpen Iraq; female Iraq versus masked male Iraq; cosmopolitan Iraq versus sectarian Iraq; British Iraq versus Americanised Iraq; diaspora Iraq versus intensely provincial and hermetic Iraq!Tamara Chalabi has the stuff, in every sense, that is needful to undertake this.' Christopher Hitchens 'Tamara Chalabi is!placed at a historical juncture!one that grew out of the void of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Her family's story allows us into the mapping of Iraq!Tamara's story is really the story of modern Iraq.' Justine Hardy, author of 'The Wonder House' 'Tamara Chalabi is a writer of exquisite talents. Her "Late for Tea at the Deer Palace" is a magical book of imagination and memory. She has achieved with Arabic material, and the world of her family and the world of Iraq, what the great Latin American authors have done in their world. An author coming into her own, Tamara Chalabi will redefine English writing in the Arab world.' Fouad Ajami, author of 'Dream Palace of the Arabs'