Nabil al-Amari is an Eng­lish teacher in Bagh­dad, in Sad­dam’s Iraq, when a chance encounter with Sama­ra Katchens, an Amer­i­can jour­nal­ist cov­er­ing the war, changes his life for­ev­er. It is April 2003 and Amer­i­can and British forces have recent­ly invad­ed Iraq.

Sama­ra, or Sam for short, is ambi­tious, cyn­i­cal and deter­mined. Nabil is both fas­ci­nat­ed and bewil­dered by her, and he’s keen to show her things she does­n’t notice in her rush to cov­er the news. She is pushed by her edi­tor to seek con­crete proof for a sto­ry con­cern­ing pay­ments for false doc­u­ments — a prac­tice which breaks all jour­nal­is­tic codes of ethics — ​“as if truth were so hard in that way, like rocks and con­crete.” In Iraq it is rarely so. 

As Sam sin­gle-mind­ed­ly pur­sues this sto­ry, she dis­cov­ers a chasm between her edi­tor’s expec­ta­tions and the real­i­ty she faces in a city torn apart by war and con­flict­ing loy­al­ties. And in her deter­mi­na­tion to uncov­er the truth, she takes one gam­ble too many, endan­ger­ing her­self, Nabil and his family.