Late for Tea at the Deer Palace: The Lost Dreams of My Iraqi Family - Hardcover

Chalabi, Tamara

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0061240397 ISBN 13: 9780061240393

Publisher: HarperCollins, 2011

Synopsis

The author tells the story of her entrance into Iraq in 2003, 10 days after the fall of Baghdad, to investigate the rich history of her family, who held a privileged place in Iraqi society until the 1950s when they were forced to flee. 40,000 first printing.

About this title

Review:

‘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 risqué new cafes her grandfather frequents, the richness of an “expired epoch” long past is lovingly rendered’ Wendell Steavenson, Sunday Times

From the Back Cover:

For Tamara Chalabi, Iraq is more than a country of war and controversy; it is a place of poignant memory. For much of the twentieth century, the Chalabis were among the most influential families in Iraq. In the 1920s they were at the forefront of their country's awakening to modernity, and they played an integral part in the establishment of its monarchy. As courtiers, politicians, businessmen, rebels, merchants, and scholars, the Chalabis enjoyed vast privilege until the end of the 1950s, when they were forced to flee to the land of exile, myth, and imagination, where their beloved homeland took on the quality of a phantom country. In between came rebellions, foreign interventions, and the transformative development of oil wealth.

But in 2003, after a lifetime of exile, Tamara arrived in Baghdad just ten days after the city's fall, in the company of her father, Ahmad Chalabi, a leading opposition figure against the Saddam regime. Late for Tea at the Deer Palace chronicles a daughter's return to a homeland she'd known only through stories and her own imagination. As she investigates four generations of her family's history, Tamara offers a rich portrait of Middle Eastern family life and a provocative look at a lost Iraq. The story is populated by an array of unforgettable characters, among them Tamara's great-grandfather Abdul Hussein Chalabi, who as a member of the Ottoman parliament witnessed the end of the empire in Baghdad and the birth of the modern Iraqi state at the hands of the British; her grandfather Abdul Hadi Chalabi, who became one of the wealthiest men in Iraq and had strong ties with the British during World War II; and her grandmother Bibi, a grande dame who presided over Iraq's social and political life during Baghdad's 1920s and '30s heyday as the Paris of the Middle East.

At once intimate and magisterial, Late for Tea at the Deer Palace vividly captures the rich, overlooked history of a country that has been uprooted by war and a family that has persevered by never forgetting its dreams or its past.

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0061240397
• ISBN 13: 9780061240393
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 414