This novel is a soliloquy, a farewell to a lover long gone, and to the self-imposed exile undertaken by the woman he left behind. The narrator, looking back over the ten years she has spent as a recluse, spends one final night pouring out her feelings of tragedy and loss.

This book deals with the culture of Catalan resistance to assimilation, through the maintenance of the Catalan language as an expression of identity. This book argues that the Catalans also developed a series of cultural mechanisms to foster identity through intellectual and recreational pursuits, as well as through an emphasis on language.

Baghdad, Mon Amour is a memoir by Salah Al Hamdani centered on his imprisonment under Saddam Hussein, his subsequent exile in France for more than thirty years, and his emotional return to Baghdad and seeing his family again after all those years with feelings of tremendous joy but also guilt for having "abandoned" them. The beauty of Al Hamdani's prose and poetry is skillfully captured in Sonia Alland's translation.