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• About this Author

author spotlight

Betool Khedairi was born in Baghdad in 1965 to an Iraqi father and a Scottish mother. She received a B.A. in French literature from the University of Mustansirya and then traveled between Iraq, Jordan, and the United Kingdom, working in the food industry while writing A Sky So Close, which was published in Arabic in Lebanon in 1999. She currently lives in Amman, where she is working on her second novel.

author bookshelf

Absent
A Novel
Written by Betool Khedairi
Translated by Muhayman Jamil

Format: Trade Paperback, 240 pages
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
On Sale: July 10, 2007
Price: $15.00

Dalal is a young woman living in a crowded Baghdad apartment with the childless aunt and uncle who raised her. In the same building, Umm Mazin, a fortune-teller, offers her customers cures for their physical and romantic ailments, Saad the hairdresser attends to a dwindling number of female customers, and Ilham... Read more >

Absent
A Novel
Written by Betool Khedairi

Format: eBook
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
On Sale: July 10, 2007
Price: $11.99

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A Sky So Close
A Novel
Written by Betool Khedairi

Format: Trade Paperback, 256 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: May 14, 2002
Price: $15.95

In this elegant, incisive debut, a young girl comes of age while aching for a sense of belonging. Daughter of an Iraqi father and an English mother, the unnamed narrator struggles with isolation both in the traditional Iraqi countryside where she’s raised and at the Western school of music and ballet... Read more >

A Sky So Close
A Novel
Written by Betool Khedairi

Format: eBook, 256 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: December 15, 2010
Price: $11.99

Read more >