A review by Peter Wittaker for ‘New Internationalist, March-April 2026

What does it mean to lose a country? To be forced to move to a foreign land and be uprooted from family and friendship ties, the culture you grew up in, even your language? And can one ever truly ‘belong’ to one’s adopted country? Iraqi writer Sinan Antoon has wrestled with these questions in four novels since he left his homeland in 1991. Notes From a Lost Country is another powerful investigation of reinvention, memory and forgetting.

The narrative alternates between two men. Omar had his ear severed as punishment for desertion from the Iraqi army, during the 1991 Gulf War. He has fled the country and sought refuge in the US, denying his Iraqi identity and claiming to be ‘Omar from
Puerto Rico’. Sami, a surgeon in Baghdad, escaped intercommunal violence in the early 2000s to live with his family in Brooklyn. Increasingly, however, his dementia is erasing his personality and his relationships.

The men’s lives echo one other. Omar’s identity is based on the lies he tells to his friends and his colleagues at the lavender farm where he finds work – obscuring his history, his disfigurement, and his nationality. Sami’s dementia, meanwhile, convinces him
that his relatives are in fact impostors.

The twin plot-lines of this fine and nuanced novel converge at the end, as the exiled lives of Omar and Sami intersect. The cultivation and use of lavender is crucial here, as is, ironically, their shared identity as Iraqis. A chance meeting between the men uncovers a hidden mutual history and leads to a revelatory and satisfying denouement.