Day of Honey A Memoir of Food, Love, and War

Now in paperback, the powerful memoir that The New York Times described as “filled with adrenalized scenes&Ciezadlo is the kind of thinker who listens as well as she writes.&Her sentences make a smart, wired-up sound on the page. Readers will be lucky to find her.�In the fall of 2003, Annia Ciezadlo spent her honeymoon in Baghdad. Over the next six years, she broke bread with Shiites and Sunnis, warlords and refugees, matriarchs and mullahs. Day of Honey is her story of love, war, and the hunger for food and friendship in times of conflict. Living in occupied Baghdad, Ciezadlo longs for normal married life. She finds it in Beirut, her husband’s hometown, a city slowly recovering from years of civil war. But just as the young couple settles in to a new home, the bloodshed they escaped in Iraq spreads to Lebanon and reawakens the terrible specter of sectarian violence. In lucid, fiercely intelligent prose, Ciezadlo uses food and the rituals of eating to uncover a vibrant Middle East that most Americans never see. From secret Baghdad book clubs to home cooking with her sardonic Lebanese mother-in-law, Ciezadlo illuminates the human cost of war and takes us into the heart of the modern Middle East at a historic moment when hope and fear collide. Day of Honey is a profound exploration of everyday survivala moving testament to the power of love and generosity to transcend the misery of war.

Annia Ciezadlo has written about culture, politics, and the Middle East for The New Republic, The Nation, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Time, Newsweek, Foreign Policy, and Foreign Affairs. Annia lives with her husband in New York.