Fiction. Haroun Soussan, narrator of OUTCAST and a Jewish convert to Islam, is a civil engineer and historian who's just completed his life's work, The Jews and History. The book opens with him getting an award from Saddam Hussein during the time of the Iran-Iraq war. Written in the form of an autobiography, the narrative moves in and out of the present, the recent, and more distant past, providing a unique and intimate chronicle of Iraq's contemporary political history. "For the Palestinian victims who became a minority in their homeland, he is one of them, as he is the unspoken vocie of conscience for Israeli Jews. This combination has made Ballas's voice unique in Middle Eastern writing, and completely outside the framework of the official political, biographical, and creative life of contemporary Israel. Reading this literature has been a way for me to discover my mirror and recover the other half of my soul"--Elias Khoury.