When Darkness Falls

Hayat Sharara (1935–1997) was a scholar, translator, and novelist. While a professor of Russian literature at Baghdad University, she authored books in Arabic on the works of Leo Tolstoy, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Vissarion Belinsky, as well as a history of Russian literature in the nineteenth century. She also wrote an authoritative biography of the renowned modernist Iraqi poet Nazik al-Malaika. Zainab Saleh is professor of anthropology at Haverford College. She is the author of Return to Ruin: Iraqi Narratives of Exile and Nostalgia, winner of the 2022 Evelyn Shakir Non-Fiction Arab American Book Award.

"With a bird’s eye view and a sardonic, at times sarcastic tone, as well as a rich spectrum of characters, the narrator shows the massive shifts in Iraqi society." —Sinan Antoon, author of The Book of Collateral Damage"You could read Hayat Sharara’s When Darkness Falls to grasp what life was like in 1990s Iraq under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. Or you could read When Darkness Falls to fathom how universities cave under political pressure which is all the more urgent today. Or you could read When Darkness Falls as an exemplary example of Arabic existential literature. Whatever the reason, you simply must read this extraordinary and necessary novel, exquisitely translated by Sharara’s daughter Zainab Saleh, and now finally available to the English-language reader." —Moustafa Bayoumi, author of How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America)