Catherine Cobham and Fabio Caiani look in depth at four authors who started writing in Iraq in or around the 1950s to explore a pivotal moment in Iraqi novel writing. They analyse the key texts by Abd al-Malik Nuri, Gha'ib Tu'ma Farman, Mahdi Isa al-Saqr and Fu'ad al-Takarli, evaluating and comparing their aesthetic and poetic qualities. It is in these works that Iraqi fiction came of age and reached artistic maturity. The best of them are among the most complex portrayals of the particularities of life in Iraq and the human condition in general to come out of the Arab world.