Fiction. Middle-Eastern Studies. "This first novel by an Iraqi woman to be published in English in the United States is a hallucinatory incantation...an ode to a city...[with]its private courtyards and public baths where the women in Huda's life rage and pray and love and scream."--Ms. Magazine. Now in paperback, NAPHTALENE captures a fierce and defiant young girl as she struggles to form her identity in 1950s Baghdad amid a world of unfulfilled women and family tragedies. Iraqi exile Alia Mamdouh is a journalist, essayist, and novelist living in Paris who received the Naguib Mahfouz Prize for Literature in 2004.