At Rest in the Cherry Orchard

Said Mardan flees Iraq when a colleague reports him for a joke about Saddam Hussein. He obtains asylum in Norway, learns the language, and becomes a postman. He marries his Norwegian language teacher Tona, even adopts her family name Jensen, and starts writing satirical stories in Norwegian for the Dagposten newspaper. However, he suffers throughout from all too vivid visitations from the ghost of his dead father, who was seized and killed by the regime before Said was born. "Where's my grave?" his father always asks.Said's life is upturned after his wife dies suddenly and he struggles with growing depression, headaches and cruel, haunting nightmares while painful and bloody memories keep rising to the fore, possibly aided by the ketamine he has been prescribed. He is urged by e-friend Abir to come immediately back to Baghdad, where a mass grave that probably contains his father's remains is about to be opened. He goes back at short notice, only to find that Baghdad after the US invasion of 2003 is not the paradise he has been promised. On the contrary the city is exhausted and in the poisonous thrall of competing religious militias: he has to carry two sets of false IDs to oblige whichever one stops him.After a brutal encounter and finding himself in a large cemetery, he recalls fondly his old Norwegian neighbour Jakob who bought an orchard of cherry trees so that he could be laid to rest there, and according to old legend, reincarnate into a cherry tree. At the mass grave, Said takes a photo of his father - an incomplete father, that is, just a skull and some bones - to fill the empty frame he brought with him. After his shattering experiences, can he also find rest in a cherry orchard?

Long-listed for International Prize for Arabic Fiction 2020

Azher Jirjees is an Iraqi writer and novelist, born in Baghdad in 1973. From 2003, he worked as a journalist in Iraq and published a number of articles and stories in local and Arab newspapers and periodicals. In 2005, he wrote a satirical book about terrorist militias entitled The Earthly Hell, which resulted in an assassination attempt against him and he was forced to flee the country. He fled to Syria, then Morocco and finally to Norway, where he now lives permanently. His other works include two short story collections, Fouq Bilad al-Sawad (Above the Country of Blackness, 2015) and Saani' al-Halwa (The Sweetmaker, 2017), and two novels. His first novel, At Rest in the Cherry Orchard (al-Nawm fi Haql al-Karaz, 2019), was longlisted for the 2020 International Prize for Arabic Fiction. His second novel Hajar al-Sa'ada (The Stone of Happiness) was shortlisted for the same prize in 2023. He works as a freelance translator between Arabic and Norwegian.

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