High Tea in Mosul: The Englishwomen of Iraq - Hardcover

This fine book, gracefully written, helps humanize the war in Iraq, Too often that horrific conflict can become so overwhelmingly grimy as to seem abstract. High Tea in Mosul helps bring that story down to earth. Lynne O Donnell's story of two Englishwomen married to Iraqi men offers an extraordinary insight into life under Saddam and the sheer terror of life in the country today. It is also chronicles two remarkable tales of travel across a deep cultural divide to create stable, loyal marriages. Should be read by everyone who wants to get past the angry rhetoric about the war to a deeper understanding of the human beings caught up in it. - Michael Goldfarb, author of Ahmad's War, Ahmad's Peace: Surviving Under Saddam, Dying in the New Iraq --Christian Parenti, author of The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq

Lynne O'Donnell is a fine writer and a brave woman. She has a powerful story to tell. --Roger Alton, Editor, The Observer

An excellent, insightful work that demonstrates how much was lost in Iraq under Saddam Hussein and a powerful examination of the suffering endured by the people who live there. --Con Coughlin, author of Saddam: His Rise and Fall

Two Englishwomen, married to Iraqi men they met in Britain and later accompanied back to the northern city of Mosul, tell their stories to a reporter in this unusual look at Westerners immersed in Middle Eastern culture and politics. Pauline Basheer, wife of an Iraqi heart surgeon and mother of two children, has lived in Iraq for more than 30 years, and her friend, another Englishwoman who also arrived in Iraq in the mid–70s. The book details how the two women got to know each other as they assimilated, learning Arabic, living within traditional Iraqi family structures, and enduring the rigors of Saddam Hussein's regime: food rationing, thought police, anti-Western discrimination, and almost constant war. Interviewed for the book in 2003, they describe their overlapping experiences in Mosul and share their individual perspectives on this life-changing experience.