Take Ezra Pound's translations of poetry from Chinese. He doesn't really know Chinese, and the very strange results that he comes up with aren't all successful, but as a whole it's incredibly successful, moving us away from familiar forms and indicating other forms we might think in or express in.

A high-ranking Syrian official in DC laughed when he heard I was reading Michel Aflaq and writing this book. He said, "Let me tell you something. There are no Baathists, no one believes this stuff, this is stuff you read in school because it's assigned to you. Maybe someone believed it, but no one really believes it." And I thought that was really interesting to hear, because the ideology of Baathism was presented so often to Americans as the core of what's wrong.

So you have in Iraq some people falling prey to the system, some people managing to negotiate independence, and other people becoming outlaws, and being imprisoned and dying. You have all sorts. I don't know any other society where poetry has such a place.

In trying to imagine this world, I kept coming back to Michel Aflaq. He's a Christian Arab, a Syrian, who ends up finding his home in Iraq and is buried there - I was stunned to see his tomb is right smack down in the Green Zone.

Academic writing you have to get right. Fiction you have to get plausible. And there's a world of difference.

Certain readers will read my book not because they are interested in Iraq, but because they read crime fiction. I did want to get beyond just speaking to other Middle East scholars, so I'm happy about that. But this was, nonetheless, a novel I wish I got to read in Arabic and translate.

Translation is harder, believe it or not. You do have to come up with a story, and actually I'm mystified by that process. I don't exactly know how the story just comes, but it does. But in writing a story that you're inventing, versus writing a story that somebody else has made up - there's a world of difference. In translation you have to get it right, you have to be precise in what you're doing.