Five Watches

Namo repairs broken watches for a living, but in his city, nothing truly heals; not grief, not fear, not the silence passed down through generations. By day, he tends to his mute, bedridden mother. By night, he works amongst silent, cast-away timepieces.

Then five watches begin to speak.

They unspool lives shaped by the Anfal campaign in Iraqi Kurdistan, the Kurdish uprising, and the long aftermath of factional war and terror. Each voice confesses a private history of love and loss, faith and hypocrisy, and the quiet beauty of those society refuses to see. Five different threads of five different lives, converging on this one young repairman.

Drawing on people and events he has encountered firsthand, rising Iraqi Kurdish novelist, Hersh Shekh Omar, shares a multi-voiced narrative revealing the hidden perspective of our lives we dare not share.

"Five Watches", a Kurdish novel translated into English, leaves each reader with a lingering thought: if our possessions could talk, what would they say about us?