Sold to Norway!

Abbas Khider’s THE PALACE OF THE MISERABLE is the 2020 novel that will get under your skin, that will make you laugh and weep. Rights now sold to Norway (Mangschou) and we are very excited for more new on rights sales soon!

Abbas Khider tells the story of a boy from the slums of Baghdad—until the moment when the boy’s life falls apart forever. Existential and intimiate as only Khider can tell stories. This is a heart-warming, then heart-breaking novel, genius in its construction, written in simple prose that will leave you no space to its tragic story.

»Abbas Khider writes slender books. They are purified. Reduced to the essentials. No knickknacks, no bits and pieces, like the luggage of a person who is on the run.« Ilija Trojanow

Shams Hussein is an ordinary boy with ordinary dreams. Hoping for a more peaceful life, his parents move with him and his sister from the south of the country to Baghdad. Soon they are living in the »Tin Quarter« next to a huge garbage mountain. These are the years of the economic embargo against the country under Saddam Hussein. The quest for a better future quickly turns into a life of existential struggle. Shams has no time to grow up: he works as a plastic-bag seller at the bazaar, as a bus driver’s assistant, as a carrier. And he loves books. But at a time when one wrong word can mean death, he enters a world whose dangers he does not see coming. This is the story of a boy from the slums of Baghdad – up to the moment when his life falls apart forever.

Rights to Khider’s A SLAP IN THE FACE sold to six countries and more than 50.000 times in Germany!