"’Who tore down the picture?’ That is the whole story, from A to Z. They wanted to know who tore down the picture."

So opens Rachid Al-Daif’s This Side of Innocence, the story of one man’s run-in with the secret police of his unnamed, war-torn country. In ironic contrast with Al-Daif’s typically clear and frank literary style, this unreliable, "innocent" narrator relates more than an A-to-Z tale. The novel’s real story is about the deeply obscure events of a personal encounter with tyranny - the tyranny of the instability and chaos of a country at war with itself and consequently preyed upon (...)