In Dust That Never Settles: Literary Afterlives of the Iran-Iraq War, Amir Moosavi offers a major comparative study of Arabic and Persian fiction written about the Iran–Iraq War (1980–88), one of the bloodiest and longest conflicts of the twentieth century. This terrible war led to heavy human losses, economic destruction, psychological damage to society, and long-term political consequences for both countries. In Iran, which did not experience a comparable major international conflict for many decades after the conclusion of the Iran–Iraq War, this war has continued to shape political culture, collective memory, and foreign relations. Despite its magnitude and the staggering loss of life, the Iran-Iraq War has frequently been relegated to the status of a forgotten war on the global scene. Amir Moosavi’s book performs a vital academic service by centering this conflict within the field of comparative literature.

Dust That Never Settles is not a comprehensive survey but a truly comparative study that reads selected works, ranging from novels and short stories to flash fiction, from both countries alongside one another. The book explores how Iranian and Iraqi writers have represented the war and its enduring effects. Moosavi examines the evolution of war literature in both countries, starting with a brief treatment of the wartime period, when much of the writing was heavily influenced by the state and often served as propaganda or official narrative. He places considerably greater emphasis on postwar fiction, devoting significantly more attention to works that challenge or go against the tenets of state-backed literature and criticize wartime governments. In contrast, he views the majority of wartime literary fiction in both countries as inferior content that glorifies war and violence.

According to the author, Dust That Never Settles seeks to introduce English readers to the central place of the Iran–Iraq War in contemporary Persian and Arabic literatures and to demonstrate how fiction shapes ongoing social and political debates surrounding the war. More importantly, however, the book shows how official wartime narratives, constructed and enforced through incentives and censorship, cannot hold once the guns fall silent. The unresolved dilemmas of the war inevitably return to haunt and derail these ideological framings.

Moosavi’s study highlights how these two national literatures engaged with the social and political debates surrounding the war. He deliberately privileges fiction over other media, noting that it is the only cultural form that was consistently produced in both countries during this period, enabling genuine comparison. By examining Arabic and Persian fiction together rather than in isolation, the book breaks down the usual national and linguistic barriers and reveals striking parallels between them, particularly in the ways postwar literature in both countries challenges and undermines official wartime ideologies.

The book profiles how Iranian and Iraqi authors countered the official idealized images of the war by portraying subversive alternatives. Mourning of losses and direct depictions of corporeal violence are chief counter-discursive elements, capable of derailing official discourses. A profound sense of loss, unredeemed by the glory of martyrdom, gradually seeps into the literature, discrediting wartime narratives, as unembellished depictions of corpses, broken bones, and mutilated flesh pollute the sanitized picture of war created by state propaganda, upending martyrdom as its cornerstone. Moosavi further explores how the conflict extended to the civilian home front, transforming the domestic sphere into a site of struggle in which literature functioned as a mode of belated resistance against the intense damage war inflicts. The author shows how these Iraqi and Iranian narratives of the home front expose both states’ attempts to suppress individual expression and the very act of artistic creation. Finally, through the use of tropes like the monstrous undead and ghosts, he shows how a younger generation of writers illuminate the war as an unresolved social specter, haunting the survivors and the broader collective memory long after the formal ceasefire. The analysis also identifies an environmental dimension in contemporary Iranian war fiction; the war’s unsettled legacy manifests in the slow violence of ecological ruin and the lingering degradation of the natural environment.

One area in which Moosavi might have reconsidered his assessment is with regard to Iranian wartime fiction. As stated, the author views this period of work somewhat dismissively, seeing it as inferior to what came after. This overlooks the counter-ideological aspects of some works from that era. For instance, Moosavi’s reading of Ahmad Mahmud’s novel Scorched Earth, a seminal text of Iranian war literature, underscores the novel’s ostensible convergences with the state-backed Sacred Defense narrative while downplaying or dismissing its subversive aspects. Moosavi emphasizes the “epic quality” the novel possesses “through the heroism of the residents who stay behind to resist” and frames it as “unflinching in its defense of violence as a necessary means to resist the Iraqi invasion” (43). These observations are supported by a quotation from a character in the novel and by paratextual information in an interview with Mahmud. If we examine the text in its entirety, however, neither its “epic quality” nor a straightforward “defense of violence” fully holds. Mahmud’s distinctive realist technique limits narration largely to what meets the eyes of a passive narrator who refrains from adding anything to referential reality, and registers a variety of observed sentiments and positions expressed by citizens. Far from homogenizing them, these voices remain distinctive. Although the novel does reflect the voices of those supporting a fierce response to aggression, its registration of popular resistance in the face of danger neither rises to the level of epic, larger-than-life characters, nor does it glorify violence. Indeed, the novel can arguably be seen as containing core elements of antiwar literature—the very elements that Moosavi later credits to Iranian postwar fiction. These include, for instance, the depiction of corporeal violence in a way that disenchants martyrdom or heroism, as well as the portrayal of grief overwhelming the bereaved or the onslaught of trauma pushing characters to the verge of insanity.

Nevertheless, Dust That Never Settles is a highly recommended and significant contribution to multiple fields. It is essential reading for anyone interested in modern Arabic and Persian fiction. Beyond its important contribution to comparative scholarship on contemporary Middle Eastern literatures, the book makes valuable contributions to cultural history and cultural memory studies. The analysis, although focused on “high” literary texts, nevertheless offers insight into the cultural dynamics of collective memory. Similarly, although the book does not engage fully with trauma theory as a critical framework, its exploration of haunting contributes to discussions within trauma studies. Above all, given the role that experiences of war have played in shaping both Iraqi and Iranian societies, the book offers a lens through which to understand the contemporary histories and cultures of Iran and Iraq.