Memoirs of exile tend to be a political as well as a personal project - an attempt to make sense of an individual’s life by untangling their country’s history. Tamara Chalabi’s sensitive and meticulously researched portrait of her Iraqi family is, accordingly, also a portrait of Iraq, a country changed beyond recognition by the changes that have swept through Europe and Asia over the last hundred years.

The book is always aware of the fraught relationship between self and homeland and details Chalabi’s shifting, malleable perception of her father’s country of birth, as well as the profound sense of loss felt by her relatives, who were forced into permanent exile. She was seven and living in Beirut when she started to realise that her roots lay partly elsewhere. “We are foreigners everywhere, and we have lost so much,” her uncle told her. “You should know these things. They are part of your history, part of who you are.”

Chalabi documents her research at intervals throughout the book, from small discoveries in newspapers and conversations with ageing relatives to her first tentative trips to Iraq. Her work is delicately unfolded through anecdotes, excerpts from letters and black and white photographs which range from stern, turn-of-the-century portraits to quaint holiday photographs. But the book reads, overall, more like a novel than a research project, full of wonderfully rich descriptions of her relatives as the narrative follows them from youth to old age.

Chalabi’s concern is not, as she repeatedly emphasises, to discover a ‘true’ Iraq, and the book details a turbulent century from a personal, rather privileged perspective. Before the bloody revolution of 1958 that left them with no choice but to flee the country, the Chalabi family inhabited an elegant world quite detached from the lives of many Iraqis: they held parties on the Tigris, dined with royalty and decorated their grand houses with ornaments from around the world. But it’s hard not to sympathise with the family, whose quirks, follies and aspirations are affectionately outlined. Chalabi’s research brings Iraq’s ‘expired epoch’ to life, from the sounds and smells of the kitchen to the elaborate jewellery coveted by Chalabi’s grandmother Bibi, a rambunctious character who provides many of the book’s lighter moments.

The men of the family are obtuse, shadowy figures, gifted at negotiating the slippery world of Iraqi politics as power shifts from one set of hands to the next. Through the windows of their houses we see the cataclysms of the 20th century played out within Iraq’s borders: Ottoman influence wanes, only to be replaced by that of the British; children leave to fight in wars conceived thousands of miles away; and anger over age-old injustices builds until it arrives violently on their doorstep. Patterns repeat themselves: in particular, Britain’s occupation of the country after the first world war and the stubborn grasp it retains over Iraqi politics is a sinister forebear of the country’s involvement, decades later, in the second Gulf war.

The book is so ambitious in its timescale that sometimes the detail seems relentless, the information too exhaustive, and Chalabi can appear too keen to demonstrate her research with superfluous detail. But it’s a moving work of research and memorialisation that should be part of a broader undertaking to understand Iraq’s recent history. As the country continues to build its fledgling democracy, it’s important to remember the stories of citizens who have been swept along by events out of their control, not to mention how the vested interests of western powers such as Britain and the US have shaped their lives.

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