“A masterly and elegantly told story that weaves together the Iraqi past and present.”
 —New York Times Book Review
“A first-class investigation…that tells the reader more about the tensions of living close to power in Saddam’s dictatorship.”
—Washington Post
The Weight of a Mustard Seed is an unprecedented and intimate account of Iraqi life under Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime, revealed through the tragic story of one of the dictator’s loyal generals. Journalist Wendell Steavenson writes thrilling nonfiction with a novelist’s flair, offering a new perspective on life inside a totalitarian regime that is as moving, compelling, and dramatic as The Kite Runner and The Bookseller of Kabul.

The Weight of a Mustard Seed: The Intimate Story of an Iraqi General and His Family During Thirty Years of Tyranny

Biographies & Memoirs

Steavenson, Wendell

Historical

Harper

General Kamel Sachet was a favorite of Saddam Hussein's, a hero of the Iran-Iraq war, head of the army in Kuwait City during Desert Storm, governor of the Maysan province, and father of nine. How did Sachet and his fellow Baathist loyalists live in Saddam's Iraq. . . and how did they live with themselves? Why did they serve such a monstrous regime? And what finally opened Sachet's eyes to the fact that he was a participant in a system of terror and repression that was strangling his country and destroying its people? Through the remarkable story of General Sachet and the stories of those around him, author Wendell Steavenson goes behind the headlines to examine a national tragedy begotten of unintended consequences. The Weight of a Mustard Seed is a gripping account of one man's rise and fall, and a vivid, compassionate portrayal of the Iraqi people.

Broadside Books

Through a series of stunningly rendered, character-drive vignettes, New Yorker writer Wendell Steavenson recounts the events of the Egyptian Revolution—from Mubarak’s fall to Morsi’s. Here is the panoply of Tahrir Square, a pointillist portrait of a people enacting and reacting to change and hope.
In January 2011, when the crowds gathered to protest Mubarak’s three decades of rule in Egypt, Wendell Steavenson went to cover the events. She spent her days on Tahrir Square, among the tents and the graffiti and the tanks, watching amazed as Egyptians of every stripe came together to challenge the might of the repressive status quo.
Circling the Square is the extraordinary story of the recent Egyptian Revolution as experienced by Cairo’s citizens. Steavenson takes us to the heart of the Revolution and paints indelible portraits of ordinary Egyptians grappling with hope and change amid violence and bloodshed. Here is Bakr, a young man from the slums with his homemade pistol; a seasoned observer who gives up on analysis; a leader who doesn’t want to lead thrust uncomfortably into the spotlight; a Muslim Brotherhood politician trying to smooth over a restless parliament; and a military intelligence officer convinced that only the army can save Egypt.
Steavenson captures the cacophony of dizzying events as violence and elections ebbed and flowed around the revolution, tipping it towards democracy and then back into the military’s hands. Mixing reportage and memoir, anecdotes and incidents and conversations, Steavenson shows how the particular and the personal can illuminate more universal questions: What does democracy mean and what happens when a revolution throws everything up in the air?

Circling the Square: Stories from the Egyptian Revolution

Humor & Entertainment

Ecco

A writer for the New Yorker describes the Egyptian Revolution in a series of vignettes as told by citizens of Cairo from differing backgrounds who each took in the violence and elections from a different points of view.

“A nuanced, engrossing novel about conviction and terrorism in a cosmopolitan, complicated world.”―National Book Review
From the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 to the terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015, Paris Metro is a story of East meets West. Kit, a reporter, has spent several years after 9/11 living in the Middle East, working as a correspondent for an American newspaper. Along the way she falls in love and marries a charismatic Iraqi diplomat named Ahmed, before their separation leaves Kit raising their teenage son alone in Paris. But after the Charlie Hebdo attack occurs and, a few months later, terrorists storm the Bataclan, Kit’s core beliefs are shattered. The violence she had spent years covering abroad is now on her doorstep. As Kit struggles with her grief and confusion, she begins to mistrust those closest to her: her friends, her husband, even her own son.

Paris Metro: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

United States

W.W.Norton&Company

The tense and timely story of an Anglo-American journalist in Paris compelled to confront her own fears as terrorism threatens to engulf her family.
From the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 to the terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015, Paris Metro is a story of East meets West. Kit, a reporter, has spent several years after 9/11 living in the Middle East, working as a correspondent for an American newspaper. Moving between war-torn Baghdad, riots in Beirut, Syria during the Arab Spring, and Greece in the midst of a refugee crisis, she befriends insurgents, fundamentalists and soldiers, diplomats, middlemen, and monks, determined to understand and tell their story. Along the way she falls in love and marries a charismatic Iraqi diplomat named Ahmed, before their separation leaves Kit raising their teenage son alone in Paris.
But after the Charlie Hebdo attack occurs and, a few months later, terrorists storm the Bataclan, Kit’s core beliefs are shattered. The violence she had spent years covering abroad is now on her doorstep. What is the point of truth and tolerance when everything is blowing up around you? As Kit struggles with her grief and confusion, she begins to mistrust those closest to her: her friends, her husband, even her own son.
Paris Metro is a taut and propulsive story of two cultures colliding under the same roof; of love, betrayal, and misunderstandings within families; and of the universal quest to find home.

A memoir of life in Georgia after the fall of Communism introduces readers to the memorable, and sometimes insane, people who struggled to dominate the republics--and survive in them--after the decline of Soviet power.

Stories I Stole

Travel

Asia

Grove Pr

Fed up with working for Time magazine in London, Steavenson moved to Georgia on a whim. Stories I Stole relates her time there in twenty vodka-fuelled episodes drawn from all over the country tales of love, friendship and power cuts, of duelling (Georgian style), of horse races in the mountains, wars and refugees, broken hearts, fixed elections, drinking sessions and a room containing a thousand roses. Stories I Stole is a wonderful example of a writer tackling an unconventional subject with such wit, humanity and sheer literary verve that one is unable to imagine why one never learnt more about Georgia before. Stories I Stole is a magnificent first book: erudite, engaged, candid and blissfully poetic. PROLOGUE: The author visits a bizarre Stalin theme park” culminating in the eery viewing of Stalin’s death mask SHASHLIK, TAMADA, SUPRA The author visits Khaketi, where she is introduced to the tamada culture of exaggerated hospitality; a point-of-honour hospitality.” During a marathon toasting session at dinner she realizes It is a kind of aggression. When they did not know you well, they filled your glass and filled it again and carefully watched how you drank it This was the Georgian way, friend or enemy with nothing in between. History was lost in tradition, drinking a way of remembering and forgetting at the same time.” SHUKI The frustration of living with unpredictable power and water supplies during extremely cold winters; the heat and/or electricity is often turned off due to reasons ranging from sabotage, corruption, non-payment, theft, black clan economics,” and incompetence. Nevertheless this leads to a particular happiness when the light does come on. The author discovers the heavenly comfort of public baths. Times were difficult; people had very little money. A lot of men were unemployed and all the old good professional jobs, teachers, nurses, police, engineers, were state jobs and paid less than $50 a month Half Tbilisi owed the other half money.” ETHNIC CLEANSING The author visits Abkhazia, where a refugee has asked her to find the apartment that war caused him to flee. She finds a woman living there who is a refugee herselfafter her own house was burned down, she discovered the fully furnished house in Abkhazia shortly after it was vacated, and has been living there ever since, proudly tending the garden of the previous occupant. WHO ARE THE ABKHAZ On the beach with Shalva, whom she suspects is Abkhaz KGB.” He feeds her the party line about the Abkhaz occupation and she feels like screaming truths at him. You won the war. You threw out all the Georgians. You have your homeland to yourselves (apart from the Armenian villages and the pockets of Russians) and what is this place? It’s a black hole. There are barely any cars, barely any petrol, no factories, nothing works, no private businesses, a curfew, no salaries, barely any pensions, a shell of a university, a terrible hospital, etc. etc.” But Shalva doubts that the West is paradise: Here we have everything we need. The land is fertile.” THE DUEL The story of Dato and Alekothey get into a car wreck and Dato’s face is horribly scarred. Aleko steals Dato’s wife and Dato challenges him to a fight. When Aleko beats Dato up, Dato pulls a gun and shoots the man until he is almost paralyzed. Dato, meanwhile, lives the rest of his life with his mother, hooked on heroin. Not really Pushkin is it?” LARGE ABANDONED OBJECTS The author drives to Abkhazia with several journalists to see incumbent Ardzinba win the presidential election (the journalists rename it the presidential farce,” since Ardzinba is the only one running. The author marvels over the abandoned relics of the USSR she sees along the roadsiderusting tractors, bits of pipline, lines of coal cars shunted and left along a rail line, etc. For her birthday, the author goes to Gorbachev’s dacha, a palatial house he built but never got to inhabit because of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The house is a metaphor for the USSR: impressive only for its sheer size but actually full of empty space and tat.”

Community & Culture

GROVE PRESS

A moving portrait of a young woman's struggle to break free from her upper-class upbringing amid the whirlwind years of the sexual revolution. It's the mid-1950s and Margot Thornsen is growing up between a Park Avenue apartment in New York City and her family's sumptuous Oyster Bay estate, as the presumed heir to her late grandfather's steel fortune. Stuck in the mores and bores of WASP society with its cocktail parties and white-gloved galas, Margot is constantly rubbing against the strictures of her domineering mother, who never misses an opportunity to lecture her on the importance of marrying well. Meanwhile, Margot dreams of microscopes and beetles and books. As she comes of age in the 1960s, a time of war and assassinations and riots, Margot's path diverges and she finds herself in the expansive world of Radcliffe College, navigating a new age of sexual liberation, scientific discovery, acid trips, and rock 'n' roll. The old rule book has been burned. There are no more limits. But now that she can choose, what does Margot really want? Hailed for her "intelligent and heartfelt fiction" (Kirkus Reviews), Wendell Steavenson writes with grace, precision, and great psychological perception. With Margot, she has crafted an intimate portrayal of the quiet torment of young women of the era, a comically caustic mother-daughter story, and a memorable evocation of one woman's passion for the wonder of science.

Margot: A Novel

Literary

General Kamel Sachet was a favourite of Saddam Hussein's, a hero of the Iran-Iraq war, head of the army in Kuwait City during Desert Storm and the governor of the province of Maysan. But when it came time for his sons to do their military service, he refused to let them join the "criminal" organization that he had given his life to. Sachet realized, too late, that he had become a participant in the terror regime that had strangled his country and destroyed its people. Through the story of Kamel Sachet and those around him-his wife; his sons and daughters; his friend, a psychiatrist; the head of the Republican Guard; a director of Abu Ghraib prison-Wendell Steavenson shows the choices Iraqis have had to make between exile and collaboration, God and jihad. In the spirit of The Bookseller ofKabulandStasiland,The Weight of a Mustard Seedcaptures the universal humanity and the tragedy of unintended consequences.

The Weight of a Mustard Seed: The Intimate Life of an Iraqi Family During Thirty Years of Tyranny

Harpercollins Canada

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Steavenson, Wendell. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Steavenson, Wendell

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Steavenson, Wendell. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Weight of a Mustard Seed: The Intimate Story of an Iraqi General and His Family During Thirty Years of Tyranny

The Weight of a Mustard Seed: The Intimate Story of an Iraqi General and His Family During Thirty Years of Tyranny

Circling the Square: Stories from the Egyptian Revolution

Circling the Square: Stories from the Egyptian Revolution

Paris Metro: A Novel

Paris Metro: A Novel

Stories I Stole

Stories I Stole

Margot: A Novel

The Weight of a Mustard Seed: The Intimate Life of an Iraqi Family During Thirty Years of Tyranny