Pro tip: maybe don’t try to read anything on the first few days you get a doggo, the poor book will only suffer from your atrocious attention span! In all fairness though, I think even if I hadn’t been distracted by Mia for the first half, the difference in quality between the first 175 pages and the second would still have stood out.

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The President’s Gardens is the story of three young men in Iraq, over the last 50 years, suffering through wars and invasions. I genuinely couldn’t tell you much about what happened in the first half (apart from anecdotes from the three friends’ lives growing up) but in the second, when Ibrahim goes to work as a gravedigger in the president’s gardens, is where the story really gets dark and, subsequently, starts to shine.

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Al-Ramli doesn’t hold back on the horrors the three friends suffer, so be prepared for some graphic scenes and imagery. But the writing itself is bold and unapologetic. The writing in translation by Luke Leafgren is the highlight of book for me, it’s such a smooth translation and Leafgren tackles challenges such as dialects and Arabic-ified (that’s a word) English with a deft hand!

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I definitely wouldn’t be averse to reading more of Al-Ramli’s work, but the slow pace and the heavy subject matter means you need to be able to concentrate and absorb it. That means no stopping to take photos of your dog sleeping in the same position for the 17th time, okay?