The new novel from the award-winning author of Guapa; and a sweeping, multi-generational saga that traces the fractured bonds between three Iraqi-British sisters

In the summer of 2014, three estranged Iraqi-British sisters are drawn back into each other’s orbits through the discovery of their late father’s lost paintings.

As Mediha, Zainab, and Ishtar lay claim to his legacy—an inheritance laced with exile, betrayal, and an Iraq they no longer recognise—Zainab’s son Nizar, a war correspondent haunted by his time on the front lines, returns to the family fold. As summer bleeds into autumn and the truth about the paintings unfurls, the family is forced to confront the personal and political betrayals that tore them apart.

Spanning continents and decades, Floodlines grapples with grief and memory, and charts the emotional and political aftershocks of a century of war and revolution in Iraq and beyond. Inspired by the artistic legacy of Haddad’s great uncle, the Iraqi modernist painter Jewad Selim, Floodlines explores family, queerness, and the wounds of (neo)colonialism in haunting, visceral prose.

"A literary voice capable of narrating untold stories of the modern gay experience, from one of the most complicated parts of the world."—Attitude Magazine

"In asking what it means to make art, FLOODLINES manages to be cinematic and essayistic in the same breath. Above all, it manages to fuse the intimate subjectivity of disinheritance and displacement with unfolding history. An epic vindication."

"Haddad writes movingly about what we inherit, and places art at the heart of his exploration into how the tragedy of a country and the tragedy of a family live on the same canvas."

Saleem Haddad was born in Kuwait City in 1983 to a Lebanese-Palestinian father and an Iraqi-German mother, and was educated in Jordan, Canada, and the United Kingdom. He has worked as an aid worker with Doctors Without Borders in Yemen, Syria, and Iraq, and has advised on humanitarian and peacebuilding issues throughout West Asia and North Africa. He is the author of the acclaimed debut Guapa, a 2017 Stonewall Honor Book and the winner of the 2017 Polari Prize. He is currently based in Lisbon.