Yasmina Khadra is on a roll and delivers the final part of what can be considered a trilogy: The Swallows of Kabul, The Attack  and now The Sirens of Bagdad.

Khadra's strength is his style and description which take his reader right into the life and terror of the Mid-East. In The Swallows he does so through the life of two couples in Kabul, in The Attack it's one couple in Tel Aviv and now in The Sirens it is a young Bedouin who grows to despise the American occupation of Iraq. Each time it is the galvanising power of Islamic fundamentalism that pushes Khadra's characters over the edge. But Khadra's mission is not to take sides but rather to build a bridge between the Western and Arab-Islamic cultures.

In the village of Kafr Karam, far from Bagdad in the sandy Iraqi countryside where most of the villagers are related by blood, world news is transmitted by satellite whereas all other facets of life are still as traditional as a hundred years earlier. Just before the Americans arrive in Badgad, Khadra's hero has a promising future as a university student, but the war forces him to return to Kafr Karam. When he witnesses an American soldier gun down his favorite cousin who was in the midst of accompanying an ill person to a medical center, his outlook on life starts to change. Then seeing his father humiliated on the patio of his own home forces him to leave and never look back. However in Bagdad, nothing changes; it gets worse and he gets trapped in an evil spiral. But Yasmina Khadra doesn't let us down, he lets humanity triumph over evil and intelligence over terror.Praise for The Attack :"Yamina Khadra's best and most ambitious novel yet...is an inquiry into the chilling mystery of the suicide bomber. " - The Los Angeles Times"Gripping and dynamic . " - Janet Maslin, The New York Times"Skillfully depicts the tensions and differences in living conditions betwe