The Kurdish Bike

Fresh out of a disastrous marriage, 57-year-old Theresa Turner, the heroine of this moving novel, leaves the Pacific Northwest for a teaching position at The International Academy of Kurdistan in Iraq in 2010. She dubs the imposing school designed for diplomats’ children “The Fortress” and is soon exploring the local bazaar (“a wonderland for the senses, this cacophony of colored plastic, traffic honks, donkey brays, dust swirls and smells of chicken fat dripping from spits”) and visiting the home of Ara and her daughter Bezma, two women in the local village. As Theresa struggles to implement her employer’s rigid curriculum and weathers financial calamity, the purchase of a bicycle lets her occupy two worlds: in one, her colleagues warn her away from “ragheads” and roads littered with land mines, and in the other she becomes something like family to Ara and Bezma, whose lives, ambitions, and fears soon become enmeshed with her own. Lightbourne writes in a cinematic prose and easily folds in background about the Kurdish people’s suffering under Saddam Hussein. This story of sisterhood, motherhood, and nationhood should have wide appeal. (BookLife)